Did You Know?

The Death Penalty by J.J. Maloney

More than 4,500 people have been executed in the United States since 1930. There is no way of knowing how many have been executed in U.S. history because executions were often local affairs, with no central agency keeping track of them.

In addition to judicially imposed executions, from 1882 through 1951 there were 4,730 recorded lynchings by vigilantes in the U.S, with many of them being highly public affairs.

Even when miscreants were afforded a trial and executed in accordance with law, such events were often local in nature. For example, while states such as New York electrocuted condemned persons at Sing Sing’s electric chair as early as the late 19th century, in states such as Missouri hangings were conducted at local county jails as late as 1937.

Capital punishment is still one of the two most divisive debates in the U.S. -- the other being abortion. The late Gov. Mel Carnahan found out how controversial during the summer of 1999 when he spared the life of convicted killer Darrell Mease at the specific request of Pope John Paul II during the Pope’s celebrated trip to St. Louis. This was an unusual step for Carnahan, who had previously allowed the execution of 22 men during his seven years in office as governor of Missouri.

This brief flirtation with mercy cost Carnahan. Newspapers across Missouri printed letters bitterly denouncing him for giving in to the Pope. When he ran for the senate in 2000, his opponent, incumbent Sen. John Ashcroft, continued to make an issue of the pardon.

Prior to the Pope arriving in St. Louis, the Missouri Supreme Court had unilaterally changed Mease's execution date -- which was to have occurred while the Pope was in St. Louis -- to a date after the pontiff’s departure. Pope John Paul II is the world's leading advocate for the abolition of capital punishment and speaks out on the issue frequently. Even so, it would appear that many Catholics are in favor of capital punishment -- along with the solid majority of U.S. citizens in general who are in favor of the death penalty.

Famous Cases

During the 20th century there was a smattering of death-penalty cases that galvanized the public, at least temporarily. The first "modern" unpopular execution was that of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on Aug. 23, 1927. Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrants who spoke broken English and were anarchists, were convicted of a payroll robbery in Massachusetts in 1920, during which a paymaster and his bodyguard were shot to death. At their joint trial dozens of witnesses testified to their whereabouts at the time of the robbery and murders, to no avail. Some of the key prosecution witnesses had at first been unable to identify the defendants, but at trial were sure of their identifications. In the seven years between their convictions and electrocutions, much additional evidence surfaced to cast doubt on their guilt. In 1925, Celestine Madeiros – condemned to death in another murder case – confessed to being a member of the gang that committed the robbery for which Sacco and Vanzetti were condemned.

Felix Frankfurter wrote a book-length article for The Atlantic Monthly that examined their case and concluded their convictions were a travesty of justice – and named the probable culprits, a gang of professional robbers. Twelve years after writing this article, Frankfurter was appointed to the United States Supreme Court, and is recognized as one of the century’s best jurists.

By the time of their executions, the Sacco and Vanzetti case had not only stirred up a maelstrom of protests in the United States, but around the world.

In August 1977, 50 years after the execution, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts signed a proclamation clearing the names of Sacco and Vanzetti.

The next great controversial case involved Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant convicted of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby. Lindbergh – the first aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic – was an international hero, and the press descended on New Jersey in droves. It’s been said that more journalists covered the Lindbergh kidnapping than covered World War I. Hauptmann was electrocuted in 1936.

Again, the issue of Hauptmann’s guilt is a continuing matter of controversy – never to be settled to everyone’s satisfaction. There have even been recent allegations that Lindbergh or a member of his family accidentally killed the child, and that the kidnapping was staged to cover up that fact.

While most of the death-penalty cases that have aroused the public have been those involving white people, a notable exception was that of the Scottsboro Boys: Roy Wright, 13, Eugene Williams, 13, Andy Wright, 17, Haywood Patterson, 17, Olin Montgomery, 17, Willie Roberson, 17, Ozzie Powell, 16, Charles Weems, 21 and Clarence Norris, 21. The nine black youths were accused of raping two white girls, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, on a freight train passing through Alabama on Mar. 25, 1931. During the trial, which began one week after the youths were indicted, more than 100 national guardsmen were stationed at the courthouse and upwards of 10,000 outsiders crowded into the small town.

The tone of the trial can be derived from the following quote from The New York Times: "Now the question in this case is this: Is justice in the case going to be bought and sold in Alabama with Jew money from New York?" --Prosecutor Wade Wright addressing the jury in Alabama v Patterson.

Eight of the youths were convicted. A mistrial was declared in the case of 13-year-old Roy Wright when the jury hung up, with eleven for execution and one for life imprisonment. The other eight were sentenced to die. The verdicts resulted in demonstrations in Europe and the United States. Liberal organizations, including the ACLU, NAACP, and International Labor Defense, sprang to the defense. Albert Einstein called for the defendants to be freed.

Eleven months after the arrest of the defendants, Ruby Yates wrote a letter denying that she had been raped.

In November 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned all of the convictions.

On Apr. 9, 1933, Haywood Patterson was retried, convicted and sentenced to death again.

On May 7, 1933, thousands of persons marched in Washington in protest of the various trials.

On June 22, 1933, Judge Horton vacated Haywood Patterson’s conviction, granting a new trial. The cases were moved to the jurisdiction of a different judge, and in November and December 1933, Haywood Patterson and Clarence Norris were retried, convicted and again sentenced to death.

The case of the Scottsboro Boys is remarkable for the number of trials, convictions, reversals and reconvictions involved. In that respect, it may be unprecedented in U.S. criminal law.

On July 24, 1937, all charges were dropped against Roy Wright, Eugene Williams, Olen Montgomery and Willie Roberson. On July 5, 1938, the last death sentence, that of Clarence Norris, was commuted to life imprisonment by Alabama’s governor.

Eventually all of the Scottsboro Boys were paroled from prison, with the exception of Haywood Patterson, who escaped from prison in 1948. Patterson was later convicted of manslaughter in Michigan following a barroom fight, and died in prison a year later.

On Jan. 23, 1989, Clarence Norris, the last living Scottsboro Boy, died at age 79.

The fourth great controversial, capital case of this century was that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of giving atomic secrets to Russia during World War II and sentenced to die for treason. The Rosenberg case occurred during the McCarthy era – when people were forced to sign loyalty oaths and the fear of communism was not only widespread but nearly hysteric in nature. The Rosenbergs maintained their innocence, and opposition to their execution was widespread. They were electrocuted on June 19, 1953.

The death-penalty case that generated the greatest outcry of all, however, involved a California paroled convict named Caryl Chessman. In 1948 an armed robber/rapist was victimizing couples found on lonely roads in the Los Angeles area. The robber would occasionally use a flashing red light on his car roof – similar to the red lights used by police at that time – to pull the couples over.

Among the many criminals questioned about this crime was Chessman. He signed a confession, which he later recanted, contending he had been coerced to confess by the police. There was almost no question that he had been interrogated for 72 hours and had been beaten to some extent – this is set out in a Supreme Court dissenting opinion. But the prosecutor maintained the confession was nonetheless voluntary.

Chessman was indicted under California’s Little Lindbergh law, which allowed the death penalty in a case of kidnapping where the victim was harmed. The prosecutor contended that Chessman committed kidnapping when he moved female victims from the car they were in to his car, for the purpose of raping them.

Chessman, an egotist of the first order, decided to represent himself – thereby reconfirming the wisdom of the adage "the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client." He was convicted and sentenced to die.

Chessman was also a bright man. He studied law while on death row and fought his case up to the U.S. Supreme Court seven times – winning small victories along the way. He also became a writer, authoring four books. The first was Cell 2455: Death Row, which became a best seller despite consisting largely of Chessman’s idealization of himself as a standup convict and old-fashioned outlaw, who specialized in robbing thieves and defying the law. He also wove a convincing case for his innocence.

Chessman, in many ways, fell victim to Hollywood’s idealization of criminals and convicts, and he parroted those fantasies in his first book – which, while it may have won him fans among many, also solidified him as a hopeless sociopath in the minds of many others.

The extreme controversy surrounding the Chessman case may be traced to a moment in time. The last year of Chessman’s life, 1959-60, was also the year in which the nation turned away from Republicanism (conservatism) to the Age of Camelot. Eisenhower and Nixon were leaving the White House, to be replaced by Kennedy and Johnson. This marked the beginning of the great civil-rights advances, which paralleled the prisoner-rights and patients’-rights movement.

As Chessman’s execution approached, it was greeted with tremendous protest – not only in the U.S., but around the world. Billy Graham, Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Frost, Pablo Cassals, Aldous Huxley and many thousands of others wrote to California Gov. Edmund G. "Pat" Brown pleading for mercy for Chessman. Brown, who permitted the execution to proceed, was tormented by that decision for the rest of his life. Ironically, California subsequently repealed the Little Lindbergh law, and by the time of Chessman’s execution kidnapping no longer carried the death penalty.

When Chessman was executed in San Quentin’s gas chamber, on May 2, 1960, the debate on capital punishment had reached a peak, a peak that was fueled further by an even blacker irony: After Chessman’s execution, it was revealed that a federal judge had granted him a last-minute reprieve, but the judge’s clerk had lost precious minutes dialing a wrong number before getting through to the death chamber, and the cyanide pellets had been dropped only moments before word of the stay got through to San Quentin’s warden.

Prior to his death Chessman had claimed a man named Terranova was the "Red Light Bandit," but the L.A. police said no such man existed. After Chessman’s death, William Bradford Huie (author of The Execution of Private Slovak) wrote a story for a popular magazine claiming that Terranova was an inmate in the L.A. County Jail at the time police said he did not exist.

In 1968, Dr. Karl Menninger, then the most prominent psychiatrist in the U.S., published his book The Crime of Punishment. Menninger had long been opposed to capital punishment and harsh prison sentences and he became a beacon light for opponents of both.

As liberal social activism mounted, however, so did its counterpart. In 1964, Barry Goldwater, in his run at the White House, made "crime in the streets" an issue in his campaign – to be followed by similar calls from George Wallace.

Despite these early calls for "law and order," the Warren Court was in full bloom. Although former Chief Justice Earl Warren is now frequently decried is a rabid liberal because of many of the court’s rulings in the area of civil rights and criminal law – i.e., Brown v. Board of Education (prohibiting segregated schools), Gideon v. Wainright (requiring the appointment of counsel in all felony cases), the Miranda ruling, (requiring police to inform a suspect of the right to counsel and to cease questioning if he requests counsel), the fact is that Warren was the Republican governor of California at the time of his 1953 appointment by President Eisenhower (an appointment Eisenhower later said he regretted).

In 1969, newly elected President Nixon appointed Warren Burger, another Republican, chief justice. The Supreme Court’s liberal bent culminated when the high court struck down capital punishment in 1972, on the ground it was cruel and unusual punishment as then applied.

But the tide was turning irrevocably back toward conservatism. By late 1972 Nixon's director of prisons, Norman Carlson, had declared that rehabilitation had been tried and failed, and that the Federal Bureau of Prisons was getting out of the rehabilitation business.

Parole was abolished in the federal prison system – with many states following suit – most often by severely restricting parole (i.e., requiring offenders to serve up to 80 percent of their sentence before being eligible for parole), or by mandating sentences of life imprisonment without parole. By the mid-1980s, even supposedly liberal Democratic candidates for office were routinely pledging allegiance to the War on Crime.

In 1976, after 35 states and the federal government had reinstated capital punishment, the Supreme Court ruled that – in view of new statutes designed to reduce the arbitrary imposition of the death penalty – it was no longer cruel and unusual. Since 1976, more than 750 prisoners have been executed in the United States, and about 4,000 convicts are on death rows waiting to be executed.

In the past few years the Supreme Court has acted to shorten the appeal time for condemned prisoners, largely by restricting the use of habeas corpus – the foremost safeguard in the Constitution between citizen and government.

Since the reenactment of capital punishment, several dozen condemned prisoners have been released from death row when their convictions were overturned – in some cases where the evidence of their innocence was unmistakable. Those cases have not caused a great outcry, however – even though dedicated abolitionists cite them at every opportunity. On Jan. 10, 1999, The Chicago Tribune commenced a series of articles on murder convictions, nationwide, that have been overturned due to prosecutorial or judicial wrongdoing, including the cases of many who were sentenced to die.

On Jan. 4, 1999, it was reported that a journalism class in Chicago had obtained a confession from Alstory Simon to a murder for which Anthony Porter had been sentenced to death. Porter had come within two days of being executed when the Illinois Supreme Court granted a stay of execution because of concerns about Porter's mental status.

The poster child for abolition in the late 1990s, ironically, was not a person wrongfully convicted but a woman whose guilt was readily admitted – Karla Faye Tucker, executed in Texas in February 1998. Tucker, an attractive young woman, admitted her complicity in the murders of two people in Houston some 15 years earlier. The crimes were heinous – involving the use of a pickaxe, and the claim by Tucker at the time that she achieved orgasm during the killings. She said she was a drug addict, and was using many different drugs at the time of the killings.

In jail she turned to religion and claimed to be a born-again Christian – a claim widely accepted by many in the "religious right," including Pat Robertson, who told "60 Minutes" that if then Texas Gov. George Bush "lets this sweet woman of God die, he's a man who shows no mercy."

The execution of Tucker underscored another dichotomy -- that capital punishment not only cleaves society, but often pits one victim against another. The brother of Deborah Thornton, Tucker's female victim, campaigned for her death sentence to be commuted, while the husband of that same victim cried out for Tucker to be executed

A woman had not been executed in Texas in 120 years and clemency appeals poured in to Gov. Bush from around the world.

Tucker’s supporters raised the objection that the Carla Faye Tucker of 1998 was not the same person who had coldly participated in two murders 15 years earlier – that, through maturation and religious conversion she had been "saved," and that the person she had become did not deserve to die.

Actually, this argument had been raised before, but had not received widespread publicity prior to Tucker’s execution. Prior to the 1960s, most executions were carried out with relative swiftness – a delay of two or three years from sentencing to execution being common. If a condemned person chose not to appeal – as was the case with Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Brown Heady, who kidnapped and murdered young Bobby Greenlease in 1953 – the execution could occur within months of sentencing.

After the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976, however, and because of court decisions such as Gideon v. Wainright, requiring the appointment of counsel, the Miranda decision, Brady v. Maryland (requiring a prosecutor to disclose evidence to defendants), and a host of other decisions, the appellate process became much longer. It has become common for the appellate process in capital cases to take 10 to 20 years. The reasons for delay – believed by many to be a result of tactics by the condemned – are many. More than 150 condemned inmates in California, for example, do not have a lawyer to appeal their case. Randy Kraft, touted by some as the serial killer of the century, was nearly released from death row because, two years following his conviction, the state had not appointed a lawyer to handle his appeal.

Death row prisoners are routinely segregated from other prisoners and often spend 23 hours a day in their cell. So, not surprisingly, a good number of them begin to study, or turn to religion. After 10 or 15 years there is a meritorious argument that many of them have changed markedly, and are, in fact, a different person than they were the day they were convicted.

Tucker exemplified that argument. When she was executed it was not only a refutation of the argument that people who change while on death row deserve reconsideration, but her death helped legitimize the execution of women – who, historically, have suffered the death penalty rarely. Only a month after Tucker’s execution, a second woman was executed with virtually no fanfare.

Although support for capital punishment plummeted 15 percent in Texas following Tucker’s execution, many more executions have followed and it appears that Texans’ support for capital punishment has been restored to previous levels.

Some polls suggest that support for capital punishment nationally now stands at 77 percent. Traditionally, a majority of women were opposed to capital punishment – this was particularly true at the time of Chessman’s execution. Since the 1960s that has changed, with a majority of women now favoring the death penalty.

Support for the death penalty is so extreme in some areas of the United States that Gordon Dillow, a columnist for the Orange County Register, argued in July 1998 that condemned men should not only be denied a last meal of their choice, but ideally should be limited to a glass of water prior to being executed.

In the 1990s three retired U.S. Supreme Court justices have come out against the continuation of capital punishment:

"I have come to think that capital punishment should be abolished." --Lewis F. Powell, Jr., retired Supreme Court Justice, 1991

"One area of law more than any other besmirches the constitutional vision of human dignity. . . . The barbaric death penalty violates our Constitution. Even the most vile murderer does not release the state from its obligation to respect dignity, for the state does not honor the victim by emulating his murderer. Capital punishment's fatal flaw is that it treats people as objects to be toyed with and discarded. . . . One day the Court will outlaw the death penalty. Permanently." --William J. Brennan, Jr., retired Supreme Court Justice, 1996

"From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored--indeed, I have struggled—along with a majority of this court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed." --Harry Blackmun, retired Supreme Court Justice, 1994

The present Supreme Court seems destined to approve of capital punishment for the foreseeable future. Last week the court ruled that Florida’s use of the electric chair does not constitute cruel or unusual punishment, even though the challenge to the electric chair was prompted by the fact a condemned man’s head caught fire while being electrocuted. This ruling by the court is reminiscent of a 1947 U.S. Supreme Court ruling – Francis v. Resweber – a Louisiana case involving a man who was unsuccessfully electrocuted and then subjected to a second, fatal, electrocution. The Supreme Court ruled that a second electrocution, for the same crime, did not constitute double jeopardy or cruel and unusual punishment.

The historical argument in favor of capital punishment has been the deterrent theory – that a person contemplating the crime of murder will be dissuaded by the prospect of being executed for his or her crime. This argument has been around for a good while, and had numerous detractors back when executions were relatively swift and sure. The deterrent theory is undermined by the fact that executions are carried out in relative secret. Although news reporters are allowed to attend executions, they are not allowed to film the execution -- even where the condemned person agrees to such filming. As executions have become more common, they are less frequently reported in the media -- and thereby lose a good portion of whatever deterrent effect they might have had.

In recent times, the deterrent theory has been abandoned to a large extent – being replaced with the more pragmatic argument that capital punishment is justified on retributive grounds and will certainly prevent that same killer from ever being released from prison and killing again.

This theory is lent credence by the great upswing in serial-killer and sex-offender crimes that seemed to burgeon in the ‘60s and beyond. Prior to 1960, cases of serial murder and mass murder were relatively rare – with cases such as that of Ed Gein, Albert Fish, Charles Starkweather, Boston Strangler, etc., coming every few years or so. For whatever reason, the incidence of serial killers and mass killers exploded in number in the 1960s and beyond (there is no way of knowing how many serial killers went undetected -- or unreported -- in earlier years).

The seminal serial-killer case appears to be the Tate-Labianca murders (Charles Manson) in the late ‘60s. That was the end of an age of innocence. Since then we have had John Wayne Gacy, Dean Corll, The Trashbag Killer, the Freeway Killer (both of them), the McDonalds Killer, Ted Bundy, the Hillside Strangler, the Green River Killer, Wayne Williams, Robert Berdella, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, and countless others – so many serial killers, in fact, that the FBI started its Behavioral Science Unit for the sole purpose of charting the phenomenon. The FBI has estimated that, at any given moment in time, as many as 50 serial killers are at work in the United States.

Another murderous phenomenon that outraged many people was the "drive-by shooting" – a drug and gang-related crime whereby mostly youthful killers often sprayed bullets into anyone who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is mirrored by the schoolyard shootings that seemed to mushroom into a mini-epidemic in 1998 -- resulting in widespread calls for the lowering of the age at which offenders can be prosecuted as adults and executed.

The prototypical case for capital punishment would be that of Lawrence Singleton – the man who, in 1979, raped 15-year-old Mary Vincent in California and then chopped her arms off with an ax.

Because of California statutes, Singleton was sentenced to only 14 years in prison and was released in 1987. When he was first released from prison, there was such an uproar in California that Singleton had to be housed on the grounds of a prison because no community would accept him as an inhabitant. He moved to Florida in 1987, where his presence was a matter of great controversy. People cursed and spat at him. One used-car dealer offered him $5,000 and a one-way plane ticket if he would leave the state. At one point Singleton attempted suicide, placing a tarpaulin over a car while the motor was running and he sat in the driver’s seat. At age 69, Singleton stabbed a woman to death in early 1997 and has been sentenced to die in Florida.

Singleton is not unique – many repeat killers (of recent times) were on parole at the time they committed horrendous multiple murders – causing many in society to believe capital punishment is the only way to ensure that such killers do not strike again.

Oddly enough, while the United States spends great sums of money to research the causes of cancer, polio, AIDS, and many other diseases, little or no money is spent to discover the causes of crime. In 1930 Karl Menninger said his main objection to capital punishment was that it constituted a waste of good guinea pigs. That objection would be as true today as it was then.

As long as the Gacys and Bundys and other serial killers face execution, they will not cooperate with any meaningful study of their behavior.

Yet, given the choice between studying such killers – in the hope of preventing future murders – or executing them in retribution, government entities throughout the United States choose the latter.

As the United States embraces capital punishment more and more fervently -- 38 states have reinstated the death penalty -- the rest of the Western world has largely chosen to eschew the death penalty.

The United States, a leader in technology and science – a leader in so many arenas – is considered "backwards" when it comes to penology. The U.S. is the only Western nation to still impose the death penalty on its citizens.

The capital punishment issue does not exist in a vacuum -- it is part of our national policy toward crime. When Caryl Chessman was executed in 1960, the state of Missouri had about 3,300 convicts, and there were only 225,000 convicts in the United States. Today, Missouri has 25,000 convicts, and there are nearly 2 million convicts in the U.S.

This has taken place while crime rates have been dropping (in a period of unusual national prosperity). Like Missouri, a number of states now spend more money on prisons than on higher education.

Eventually the United States will adopt a national policy on the treatment of murderers. When that happens, we will harken back to the 1930s wisdom of Karl Menninger – that we not waste good guinea pigs.

Volunteering for Death: The Fast Track to the Death House by Robert Anthony Phillips

Timothy McVeigh was far from alone in his desire to speed up his execution date by dropping the appeal of his death sentence. There are dozens of death row inmates in the United States who have or who are doing the same thing: "volunteering" for death. In the last year, volunteers have been executed in Nevada, Florida, Indiana, Arkansas, Virginia, California and Oklahoma.

These volunteers get on the fast track to the death house by pleading guilty and asking for a death sentence at their trials or, most often, dropping their appeals after they are convicted.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that the death penalty was constitutional as long as its imposition was accompanied by certain safeguards, 90 of the 722 convicted murderers executed in the United States have been volunteers, according to a recent study conducted by Amnesty International, the human rights group. More pointedly, about two-thirds of the voluntary executions have occurred since 1994, AI reports.

Since 1995, 409 convicted killers have been executed in the United States, with at least 61 of those volunteering for death, the rights groups says. Overall, the study by AI reported that volunteers have accounted for one in eight executions in the United States.

Volunteering for a quick death is not a new phenomenon. It has quietly gone on since 1977 when Gary Gilmore dared Utah to put him before a firing squad and thousands volunteered to serve on the firing squad to pump bullets into him.

But there has been renewed interested in the volunteer phenomena due to McVeigh's execution and a recent spate of voluntary trips to the death house. During a seven-week period from March 1 to April 21 of 2001, five of the 10 men executed in the United States were volunteers, including two on the same day in California and Oklahoma.

In some states, it is difficult to be executed unless you are a volunteer. Of the three executions in Washington State since 1993, two have been volunteers. In Nevada, eight of the nine executed were volunteers. Of the six executions in Utah since 1977, four were volunteers.

Bizarre Cases

The rush to the death house has sometimes left criminal defense lawyers scrambling in last ditch legal attempts to save the lives of often uncooperative and hostile clients or grappling with the ethical dilemma of whether they should give up and allow their clients to die.

Some volunteer cases take bizarre turns. At Nevada's last voluntary execution on April 21, one lawyer found himself in the death chamber asking his client if he wanted to continue his appeals -- as the condemned man lay on an execution gurney minutes away from being put to death.

Sebastian Bridges, 37, had acted as his own lawyer at his trial, claiming he was innocent of murdering his estranged wife’s lover. When the jury found him guilty, he told the jurors in disgust to give him the death penalty. They did. He later decided to protest his death sentence in an unusual way: by giving up his appeals so that he could be executed. His lawyers, thinking him quite mad, had advised him that this was not a good way to rage against the death-penalty machine.

His lawyers were right. For there was Bridges, lying strapped to an execution gurney in a prison in Carson City, Nev., still raging that he was innocent of murder, shouting out that he didn't want to die, and yelling that the state was trying to kill him "like a dog."

During the time Bridges lay strapped on the gurney taking in the last moments of his life, his lawyer assured him that if he wanted to continue his appeals, his execution would be stopped. Bridges refused. The chemicals flowed into his body.

"He died protesting his innocence and the unfairness of the process, yet he was unwilling to stop it," said federal public defender Michael Pescetta, who went into the execution chamber twice to ask Bridges if he wanted to continue his appeals.

"I've seen other executions and they are distressing enough," said Pescetta, "but I think this was significantly stranger for everyone involved...You feel, as a lawyer, that they are doing this to you. You’re trying to get the system to take the person off death row. You expect that everyone wants help not to be executed. It’s disorienting."

Some of the volunteers go to their executions with interesting beliefs. One man believed he was a vampire and could not die. Another spit at his lawyer and then threatened to slit his own mother's throat if she tried to block his execution. One said that he was not afraid of death because he had transported himself, just like Capt. James Kirk used to do on "Star Trek," from death row and into God's hands and found out that when he died, he would find peace in God's palm. Another thought he had the ability to bring the dead back to life.

Why Volunteer to Die?

Why are so many admitted or convicted killers volunteering to be executed? Criminal defense lawyers, psychiatrists and death-row inmates themselves offer a variety of reasons. Some volunteers are crazy. Some find God and are convinced that heaven awaits them if they pay for their crimes with their lives. Some use murder as a means of committing suicide. Some just can’t live with themselves for what they did. Others like the idea of controlling a system they really have no control over.

But, the most prevalent reason cited is that life on death row is not really life.

Twelve states have no death penalty, but of the 38 that do most isolate condemned prisoners in high-security cellblocks within maximum security prisons away from the general prison population, keeping them locked in their cells up to 23 hours a day. Studies have shown that prisoners who are isolated become severely depressed and delusional, possibly making them want to end their lives and give up their appeals. Even if the death row inmates are not insane, the isolation and restrictions imposed lead some to want to end their lives, rather than living in such conditions, defense lawyers and death row inmates say.

Throw in the poor quality of legal representation available to the vast majority of death-row inmates, and any realistic legal remedy is virtually moot. In July The New YorkTimes reported that "dozens of inmates on death row lack lawyers for their appeals… . The situation has dire consequences, experts say, because two out of three appealed death sentences are set aside because of errors by defense lawyers at trial or prosecutorial misconduct." The Times report was based on the most comprehensive death penalty study completed to date, a study conducted by lawyers and criminologists at Columbia University. For inmates with ineffective counsel or no counsel at all -- even the innocent ones -- the reality of spending the remainder of their lives in isolation with no hope of parole can make the prospect of death inviting. Some inmates come to view their executions as their great escape.

Robert Johnson, an American University professor who has studied men on death row, says it is common for condemned prisoners to think about giving up.

"We do have a number of people on death row who are mentally ill, and that explains the extremity of their crimes," Johnson said. "Mentally ill people are more vulnerable to stress, less intact psychologically and less able to cope with adversity. They are more likely to be harmed by being isolated because it leaves them alone with their problems.

"For a number of inmates, death row is living death. It becomes unbearable and execution is a less painful option."

That brings up another factor some experts cite to explain the dramatic upshot in volunteers: Inmates don't fear execution by lethal injection as much as they did by other means, particularly by electric chair.

Of the 38 death-penalty states, only Alabama persists in deploying the electric chair; all the others have moved to lethal injection as the primary means of execution.

"The electric chair was feared," said William Laswell, an assistant public defender in Broward County, Fla., who predicts that still more prisoners languishing on death row will want to end their agony and take the easy way out -- by simply being injected and going to sleep. "We now give them an option of having their head burned and nose broke in the electric chair or taking a nap with lethal injection. There are a lot of guys who simply don’t want to spend the rest of their lives in prison and don’t want to die in prison."

Laswell was referring to a 1990 Florida execution in which flames shot from the head of Jesse Tafero during his electrocution and, later, another Florida case in which a murderer being put to death in the chair had blood run from his nose and down his chest. (To view photos of this execution, click here.) Florida now uses lethal injection as its primary means of execution.

But the argument that execution is no longer feared by some condemned prisoners didn’t stop three Alabama killers from dropping their appeals and going to their deaths in the state’s electric chair.

The Depravity of Death Row

Anthony Boyd, a death-row inmate in Alabama who is fighting his conviction, knew the three Alabama inmates who gave up their appeals and were executed. Boyd believes their decisions were based on the isolation on death row and the anguish caused by having a death sentence hanging over their heads.

"When you walk into this camp, you can feel the death," said Boyd. "It’s like walking into a graveyard...Fathers watch their kids grow up form here. Guys watch as family members abandon them and family members die off. You’re treated like animals."

Boyd said the three of the men --Pernell Ford, Steve Thompson and David Duren -- told him why they wanted to be executed. Duren was executed in January 2000; Thompson in 1998; and Ford in June 2000.

"Pernell Ford I knew personally and considered a real friend," Boyd said in a letter. "He also attempted suicide by cutting his wrist. After that we had a chance to talk. I asked him why would he do this -- attempt suicide and drop his appeals. He just simply said, ‘I’m tired, homeboy.' See, Pernell had been here for about 13 years and came when he was in his teens. Pernell also believe he was a god...Steven Thompson had given his life to The Lord, and decided he was just simply ready to go. David Duren said he had grown weary from everyone dying around him, so he too gave up."

Massie: Death Better Than Prison

In California, two-time killer Robert Lee Massie, who had first tried to give up his appeals since 1979, was executed on March 27. Spending the rest of his life on death row was on the mind of Massie when he decided he’d rather die than spend life behind bars. He said death was a "rational" decision over life behind bars in a maximum security prison.

"Even if I were to win an appeal, I will never again see the outside of prison," Massie said in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle on March 13. "I have lived in prison most of my adult years, nearly 30 on death row. I am a rational man. I do not consider foregoing the raptures of another decade behind bars to be an irrational decision."

Massie had been sentenced to death in the early 1970s, but had his sentence commuted and was later released on parole after the U.S. Supreme Court found the death penalty unconstitutional. After he was released, Massie murdered a man and found himself back on death row -- this time with the death penalty reinstated by the courts.

Suicide by Execution

Lawyers and psychiatrists also point to documented cases over the years where murder is used as a tool to "commit suicide by execution." Such is the case with Daniel Colwell in Georgia, who wants to die in the state’s electric chair and murdered two people to accomplish his goal.

Colwell told a jury that he never had the courage to kill himself, and believed that by shooting and killing two people at random in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Americus in 1996, the state would fulfill his death wish by executing him.

At his 1998 trial, Colwell, diagnosed with schizophrenia and other mental problems, was found competent to direct his own defense. He pleaded guilty to the murders. He boasted about the slayings to the jury. He threatened jurors and their families if they did not recommend a death sentence. The jury obliged.

Michael Mears, his lawyer, has appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court asking it to bar the execution of the mentally ill -- which he believes Colwell is. Colwell has fought back, making a failed attempt to hire a lawyer to replace Mears to expedite his execution.

"It’s been a nightmare fighting the judge and fighting Daniel," said Mears, who believes Colwell should not have been allowed to represent himself. "We are being forced to be instruments of Daniel’s suicide."

Even Daniel Bibler, an assistant district attorney in Sumter County, Ga., who helped prosecute Colwell, said the admitted killer had no other motive other than his desire for his own death. But, Bibler stressed that Colwell’s act was more important that his motive.

"We took him as a calm, communicative person who intelligently planned out something, carried it out with full knowledge of what he as doing and understood the consequences of what he was doing," Bibler said. "We never disputed that he had been diagnosed with a mental disorders. But clearly, he was not delusional and clearly he was in touch with reality."

Is There a Place for the Volunteer?

Are some defense lawyers being elitist and arrogant in trying to legally frustrate a condemned killer’s death wish? Is there a place in the criminal justice system for a condemned killer to volunteer for death, or must each case -- even the most hopeless ones -- be fought to the legal limits.

Some lawyers believe there is a place for a condemned man to have the "dignity" of deciding that he or she wants to be executed, providing the inmate is not insane.

Michael Mello, a Vermont Law School professor and expert on the death penalty, believes there is a place in the capital-punishment system to allow competent, condemned prisoners to give up their appeals and be executed rather than languish for years on death row or have no hope of freedom.

He argues that many defense lawyers are forcing their own political choice -- opposition to capital punishment -- and blinding themselves to the duties to their client.

"The conventional wisdom is that clients never freely and voluntary choose to be executed," Mello said. "That they are driven by their circumstances and the lawyers have a paternal or maternal role to protect their client form himself if necessary...I think that’s dead wrong. It's a simple lack of human empathy on behalf of the lawyer, arrogance and elitism. We represent clients, not issues."

Melvin I. Urofsky, a professor of history and public policy at Virginia Commonwealth University who has studied the issue of volunteers, also believes that because most death-row inmates are guilty of murder and have no hope of freedom, execution is a valid option for them. He also compares these condemned murderers with terminally ill patients who choose to end their lives.

"Some people do not like the idea...of spending the rest of their lives in a six-by-eight- foot room," Urofsky said. "For them, death is the preferable option."

But most criminal defense lawyers believe that volunteers must be protected from "committing suicide" and not be allowed to control the criminal justice system by demanding execution. They say that anyone seeking his or her death cannot be competent.

While acknowledging a client’s right to direct his own defense -- even if that means pleading guilty and asking for a death sentence -- most defense lawyers believe execution is never in the best interest of a client.

"If someone is standing on the edge of a cliff saying he wants to shoot himself and to please hand him a gun, do you do it?" asks Susan Cary, a public defender in Florida who counsels death row inmates.

"Remember, the appeals are for society, not the prisoners," adds Abraham J. Bonowtiz, an anti-death penalty activist in Florida, where two of the last three persons executed have been volunteers. "Appeals are for us to make sure we followed our own law. When appeals are waived, society is denied the full and fair review of a process filled with mistakes."

Court Challenge to Death-Row Conditions

Julie Hall, an Arizona lawyer who has helped represent three volunteers (two of whom were executed), said that she has yet to see a case where the inmate seeking death has been competent to make that decision.

Hall blames death-row conditions as the primary reason why so many already mentally ill, condemned inmates are being "tortured to death" and volunteer for execution. Authorities have estimated that as many as 10 percent of all death row inmates suffer from mental illness.

"The conditions in prison are getting worst," Hall said. "People need to understand that death-row inmates are not being housed in a country club. People are being put in long-term solitary confinement that the human mind is not wired to survive. Another factor is that you have people in jail who are severely depressed and not being treated. They are not making competent decisions."

Hall and another lawyer have brought a unique case to federal court. A federal appeals court has ordered a district court in Arizona to hold a hearing to determine whether one of Hall’s clients, death-row inmate Robert Comer, 44, was influenced into volunteering to end his appeals because of the isolated conditions he has been kept in for more than a dozen years.

In a case being watched closely by other criminal defense lawyers, Hall derailed the condemned killer’s death wish by convincing the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit last June that Comer’s isolation on death row may have played a part in his volunteering for execution.

While defense lawyers routinely challenge the competency of condemned inmates wanting to be executed, Hall said that to her knowledge, it is the first time a federal court has ordered a hearing on whether conditions on death row may have caused a condemned prisoner to volunteer.

Hall previously tried to head off the executions of two other death-row volunteers, Donald Miller and child killer Daren Bolton, but both were eventually executed. In the Miller case, Hall was appointed to represent the condemned man’s lawyer as his "next friend" in an attempt to continue appeals.

Hall said that Miller suffered severe depression most of his life and the isolation on death row was "tortuous" and inflamed his desire to die.

"There is no way that combining his mental illness and the conditions in that prison that he could make a voluntary decision to be executed," Hall said.

A key to the Comer case will be psychiatric studies and testimony arguing that prisoners kept in long-term maximum security housing suffer anxiety, confusion, a sense of unreality, depression and are prone to violent behavior. Isolation has more dramatic affects on condemned prisoners already suffering from mental illness, the experts say.

Like most death penalty states, Arizona’s condemned prisoners are isolated in a special management unit. Arizona death row is located in Florence, with condemned prisoners fed in their cells, locked down 23 hours a day and allowed no contact visits.

Camilla Strongin, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Corrections, said condemned prisoners are isolated from the general prison population because they have proven by their crimes that they are a danger to other prisoners and guards.

Comer was sentenced to death for shooting a man to death at a campground in 1987. Following that murder, Comer then went to another campsite, hog tied another man and raped his girlfriend in front of him, prosecutors say.

At his sentencing in 1988, he was brought in shackled to a wheel chair and naked, except for a cloth covering his genitals. Since deciding to end his appeals, Comer has blamed Zionists for trying to save him and asked the judge who sentenced him to sign his death warrant.

Before being sentenced to death in Arizona, Comer had spent years in isolation in a California prison for misconduct while serving a sentence for other crimes, Hall said. Since arriving on Arizona death row in 1988, Comer has been cited for 37 violations of prison rules including possession and manufacture of weapons and arson, prison officials said.

Pati Urias, a spokeswoman for the Arizona attorney general’s office, said that prosecutors believe Comer is competent to make the decision to die and that death-row conditions are fair and humane.

Comer refused to be interviewed for this article, telling a prison official that "I hate reporters more than lawyers."

That’s Why They Call It Death Row

Victim’s rights groups, such as the Texas based Justice for All, argue that many of the condemned prisoners who volunteered for death admitted to their crimes and were simply acquiescing to the punishment. The group has no sympathy for claims that depression, isolation and mental illness are to blame.

"Death row is just that: death row," said Dianne Clements, president of Justice for All, a criminal justice reform group that favors the death penalty. "We are constitutionally bound to provide them with adequate health care, adequate housing, and adequate protection against harm or injury. We do that and we should not be cajoled or bullied into creating a resort atmosphere."

Clements also points out that in all the cases of volunteers, the courts have had competency hearings and the condemned prisoners had been found to be sane.

A Tough Decision for Defense Attorneys

Some criminal defense lawyers admit that they can see a client’s point of view in asking to be executed, but it is still unsettling.

In Oklahoma, Barry Derryberry, an assistant public defender, who was one of three defense lawyers assigned to defend death-row volunteer Ronald Fluke, found himself torn between his hatred of the death penalty and respect for the 52-year-old Fluke’s wish to be executed.

"By applying the brakes to the client’s wishes to race to the death chamber, lawyers protect ...the client’s rights to not be unlawfully executed and to decide what the defense’s goal shall be," Derryberry said. "This role prevents the system from degenerating into a suicide mill."

"But I can understand the pragmatic choice one has under a death warrant," Derryberry added. "What kind of life is that to lead?"

Fluke pleaded guilty to murdering his wife and two children, waived his appeals and was executed on March 27, saying it was just punishment for his crimes. Three days into jury selection in his trial, Fluke had informed his lawyers that he wanted to plead guilty and asked to be sentenced to death.

In Virginia, lawyer Thomas Blaylock said he respected the decision of his client, Thomas Akers, executed on March 2 for beating a man to death with a bat. Akers had pled guilty and asked for a death sentence, promising to kill again.

"I thought to myself, ‘Who am I to tell him he can’t do this,’ " Blaylock said. "On one hand, I had a competent client who made the decision and the other side of me is saying nobody should want to do that...I have to fight for these people because it makes it easier for the system to execute other people. It was really bothering me not fighting for my client..."

Blaylock, like Florida's Laswell, believes more inmates will be volunteering for death on the nation’s ever expanding death rows.

"We’ve got these supermax prisons where everything is restricted so you’ll see more guys volunteering rather than staying inside them," Blaylock said. "Taking a shot (lethal injection) is not as bad for them."

But when a criminal defense lawyer decides to help an admitted killer die, he can become a pariah in the defense community.

Lawyer Helps Client Die

That’s what happened in Oklahoma in 1993, when then Tulsa County chief public defender Johnie O’Neal decided not to try to block the execution of Thomas Grasso, a two-time killer who told him that he’d rather be executed than spend life in prison.

O’Neal said his decision resulted in death threats, hate mail and damaged his relationships with some criminal defense lawyers. Grasso, 33, was executed in 1995.

"My belief that people shouldn’t be executed had to be put aside, "O’Neal said. "Actually, I am proud of the fact that I was willing to do it and could do it."

Grasso murdered an elderly woman in New York and was sentenced to 20-years-to-life prison sentence. Grasso later confessed to the unsolved murder of an 87-year old woman in Tulsa in 1990, saying he wanted to return to Oklahoma, plead guilty and be sentenced to death.

O’Neal allowed Grasso to plead guilty to murder and offered no mitigating evidence that could have saved him from a death sentence. O’Neal drew the wrath of defense lawyers when he appealed to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals asking the court to allow Grasso to waive his mandatory appeals and be executed. The court denied the request, although the death sentence was upheld.

But other defense lawyers accused O’Neal of violating ethical rules and filed a legal challenge to try to block the execution.

"It bothers me and still does," said Robert Ravitz, the public defender for Oklahoma County. "Why do you need a lawyer to advocate somebody for a death sentence? You don’t have a constitutional right in the Untied States to get a death sentence -- yet."

Some Current Volunteer Cases

Scan the death row rosters in most death penalty states and, nowadays, you'll find men and women seeking to quicken their trips to the death house.

One is Kevin Scudder, an Ohio death-row inmate convicted of murdering a 14-year-old girl. He is fighting attempts by his lawyer to keep him alive. He scoffs at anti-death- penalty advocates who want to keep him from the execution chamber, wishing they could watch him die.

"They don’t give a **** about me personally," Scudder said in a telephone interview. "I wish they had a gas chamber in this state so they can see me flop around like that rabbit on the television show. Did you see that on television?"

He insists he is not crazy in wanting to die, saying that God is calling him home.

"I am far from crazy. I have decided to waive my appeals because God is calling me home. I know he is calling me home because he would never have let the State of Ohio put me on death row for something I never did if he didn’t want me to come back home."

Another high-profile murderer seeking a quick execution is Aileen E. Wuornos, a former prostitute turned serial killer. She was sentenced to death for killing six men in Florida and now believes she has the "right" to be executed.

In April, she wrote a letter to the Florida Supreme Court asking the justices to end her appeals and allow her to be executed, saying keeping her alive violates her constitutional rights.

Wuornos said in the letter that she was guilty, and enough tax money has been squandered in keeping her alive.

On the federal level, McVeigh wasn't the only inmate seeking to die. David Paul Hammer, another federal prisoner awaiting execution in Terre Haute, Ind., believes that his execution would be better than spending the rest of his life in prison.

Hammer pleaded guilty to strangling a cellmate and knows he will never regain his freedom -- even if his death sentence is overturned. He was serving more than a 1,232-year sentence in Oklahoma after breaking out of prison and shooting a man following a carjacking. He had been sentenced to prison originally for an incident at an Oklahoma hospital in which, after becoming angry that he wasn’t receiving treatment for a drug problem, grabbed a nurse and held her hostage.

Oklahoma authorities described Hammer as a troublesome prisoner who committed scams while behind prison walls. These included soliciting phony donations for a religious ministry, sending threatening letters to judges, two escapes, and phoning in a bomb threat to the state capital. Prison officials, in order to control Hammer, placed him in a specially constructed isolation cell. His lawyer said that Hammer caused trouble in prison to force Arizona corrections officials to transfer him to federal prison, which he viewed as a better place to serve his time.

Hammer got his wish. He was transferred from the Oklahoma prison system into the federal prison system in 1993, and then sent to various federal facilities, in California, Kansas and finally Pennsylvania, where he admitted to strangling his cellmate.

Hammer views his execution as his "final escape."

"I’ve spent half my life in prison for the most part," Hammer said in a telephone interview from the prison. "I don’t live here. I merely exist. There is a big difference in living and existing. In order to live, your life has to have a meaning, a purpose."

Hammer, 41, had given up his appeals and was scheduled to be executed on Nov. 15, 2000. But he changed his mind and continued his appeals. In early April, the Supreme Court rejected his latest appeal.

Since the interview, Hammer, a diabetic, attempted to commit suicide by injecting insulin directly into a vein.

Rather Death than Life

But inmates with a death wish don’t always get what they want.

In Florida, Edward Gryczan, sentenced to life in prison in 1998 for murdering his mother, asked for a death sentence at his trial. Although the jury recommended that he be executed, his lawyer fought him by demanding hearings on Gryczan’s competency. A trial judge later overturned the death sentence, and instead sent him to prison for life.

Three years into his life prison sentence, Gryczan, 54, said he’d still rather be executed than spend life behind bars without the psychiatric treatment he believes he needs.

"I think of the crime all the time, Gryczan said. "I think of my mother all the time. If I was sane at the time, then I deserve to die. I can’t see spending the rest of my life like this, waiting to die of old age. Prison is not a place for the old."

The Walls by J. J. Maloney

When I was sent to the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City, in February 1960, there were 2,500 men inside "the walls." The white convicts slept three to a cell (except for several hundred in the one-man cells). The blacks slept as many as eight to a cell.

Stabbings and killings, robberies and rapes were common. Dope was easier to get in prison than it was on the streets. There were men in prison who were said to make more money each year from dope and gambling than the warden was paid. There were captains on the guard force who owed their souls to certain convicts.

You never knew whom you might have trouble with. The reasons for murder and mayhem made little sense to anyone except the convicts. So hundreds of men either carried a knife or had one they could get to in an emergency.

You wonder if you have an enemy in the "population." If you have, he has the advantage: He got there first, he made friends, he knows the prison. He has a knife; you don't.

A lot of men, thinking of the enemies they made outside, begin to imagine that they see them in a chowline or in a line of men going to work. And many of them "check in" for protection.

A lot of men would rather die than check in. A lot of men have died, though all they had to do was walk up to a guard and say "protect me."

There are other ways of getting into trouble in prison. No matter how much you've been around, you feel uneasy when you go to prison. If you are young and goodlooking, you can count on being confronted again and again. If you have money, there will be people who want it. If you are helpless, there are people who will try to make a reputation at your expense. Or you may simply say the wrong thing to the wrong person.

In 1961 a prisoner I knew went up to a 22-year-old man and told him that he wanted to have sex with him. The young convict, within two months of going home on a two-year sentence, replied, "I don't want any trouble-but I'm not going to be a punk." (A punk plays the female role in a homosexual relationship.)

The young man worked on the food service dock. The next day the older inmate walked up, drove a 22-inch ice pick through the young man and raped him as he lay dying.

In 1963, a 16-year-old black inmate resisted the sexual advances of a group of older convicts. They caught him in the A-hall shower and stabbed him to death while he screamed for help. After they killed him they rolled his body up in a tarpaulin, dried themselves off and returned to their cells. All because he didn't want to be a punk.

Some older inmates decided they were going to make a punk out of another young black convict at Jeff City. The boy's uncle, also serving time in the prison, tried to intercede in his behalf. The uncle was stabbed to death for "meddling."

You never know for sure what is going to happen from day to day in prison. If you mind your own business you probably will not have any trouble, but there is never any guarantee.

In 1966 an inmate working in the school was daydreaming and looking in the direction of another convict. At recess the daydreamer was stabbed twice in the liver. I watched him die. The killer remarked later that the victim had been staring at him.

Not long before that an inmate in the kitchen walked up to a man and chopped off the back of his head with a meat cleaver. He explained later that Moses had come to him in a vision the night before and told him to do it.

In prison, paranoia and fear are natural states of mind. You develop a vigilance and alertness that makes you sensitive to who is around you, their moods, their actions. You become chronically suspicious.

Violence is only one aspect of prison. Sometimes when you get to know the men you feared, you find beneath their icy visages warm, lonely, desperate beings who would like to reach out to you but who are afraid to.

There was a time when I cared for Ronald Westberg the way I would a brother. He was serving 25 years for shooting a state trooper. To his friends he was warm and giving-anything he had was yours. He tried to escape several times, always in the company of friends; one such attempt ended with two of his friends being shot down in the yard.

When Ronnie first came to the prison he was stabbed in the back over a relatively minor matter. He always carried a knife after that. He had a quick temper and assaulted several other inmates. He became increasingly paranoid.

Some inmates spoke resentfully of Ronnie behind his back. A lot of men tried to belittle him by starting rumors. These things got back to Ronnie. He felt that the convicts who hated him might think he'd lost his nerve; and if they thought that, they might work up the courage to attack him.

He had a kitten-he pampered it, spoiled it. A kitten was something he could love without his love being mistaken for weakness. One day he came in from work and found the kitten dead, crushed by the electrically operated cell door. He felt that it had been done by someone who hated him. He draped the dead kitten over the lever that operates the doors and vowed to kill the person responsible.

Several months later he killed a man. He told me later that he'd had an argument earlier that day with the person. When he came out of the cellblock to go to the yard, he said, "the guy was looking at me and laughing. So I killed him." That prison killing, plus his earlier escape attempts, pushed Ronnie's original 25-year sentence up to 52 years.

In December 1970, while in solitary, Ronnie hanged himself.

There are many Ronnie Westbergs, and while they live in fear they also create fear in others. I'm talking about a gnawing kind of anxiety that puts a sharp edge on all your senses. It permeates your subconscious. It catapults survival to the top of your list of priorities.

Wanting to survive in prison can make an actor out of you. There are certain roles you can play that enhance your chances of being accepted by other convicts, of being left alone, respected; and respect, ultimately, is the key to "making it" in prison.

The Missouri State Penitentiary is, and always has been, a custodial institution, one whose guiding philosophy is to minimize killings, riots and work strikes. The officials want a tranquil atmosphere.

There are programs at Jeff City-primarily education programs-but all of the programs combined involve barely one-third of the inmates. Some of the best programs were started by the inmates-in spite of official apathy, and often over official opposition.

The art class began with one man, once a death-row prisoner, named Samuel Norbert Reese. Sam was sentenced to die at age 19 for a murder committed during a holdup. Father Charles Dismas Clark took an interest in him, and with Clark's help Sam's sentence was commuted to life (actually, two lifes plus 75 years).

Sam got his hands on a painting course and developed an uncommon ability as an artist. (In 1961, because of his prison cartoons, he was featured in Time magazine).

Sam worked first as a porter in the Catholic Chapel and set up an easel in the corner. One day the warden, the late E.V. Nash, asked Sam if he would teach another, younger inmate how to paint. Sam agreed. His group grew, until he was given a corner in the library and, ultimately, a classroom in the school. One of the men he instructed was Albert Bradford, now known as Malik Hakim. The prison art group won many awards, had many exhibitions, and Reese and Bradford were recognized as possible "comers" in the art field.

Then the art class was closed by the warden, because, as he told Jan Dickerson, then art critic for The Kansas City Star, the inmates were drinking the oil paint and holding sex orgies in the art class.

Prisoners, however, said the reason was a dispute between the warden and the education director over who would get credit for what the artists accomplished.

Bradford was one of the first people I met in the prison. He had been sentenced at age 19 to life for forcible rape. By 1960, with eight years served on his sentence, he was an accomplished artist and an equally accomplished con man. He was one of eight or nine leaders among the black inmates--a Black Muslim at a time when only a few knew what a Black Muslim was.

He loved books, especially poetry, mysticism and oriental philosophy. He introduced me to Sam, and it was through talking with these two that I realized how little I knew about books.

They got me into reading, and they shared their small hoard of tempera with me. By drawing in the dirt in the yard, they showed me how to do line drills and taught me the principles of composition and perspective.

When we ran out of tempera we used instant coffee for yellow, beet juice for red, kitchen cleanser for white, crushed pencils, anything. In spite of our pleas the warden did not let us reestablish the class until 1964.

In 1961 I tried to escape. For that attempt I was given 10 days in the hole and six months in solitary. Solitary, at that time, was on the third floor of E-hall, a century-old building, now torn down.

Each of the three floors had two tiers of cells, for a total of 336 cells. The bottom floor was occupied by regular inmates; and since the E-hall cells were considered among the choicest in the prison, because of laxity of supervision, it was considered something of a politician's row. The second floor was for protective-custody cases-people who had "checked in" for protection from other inmates. The third floor was solitary confinement.

The days of true solitary confinement are largely past, although some prisons, including the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, still have cells with closed fronts. Solitary now usually consists of being put in a cell with a barred front; while you can hear your neighbor, you can't see him. You stay in that cell, except for a weekly shower and an occasional visit. Some prisons, including Jeff City, under pressure from the federal courts, have begun allowing token recreation, infrequently, but enough to keep them from losing a case in the courts.

Solitary confinement is a community of people unlike any other. It is enforced association for protracted periods of time. It is a world of mental tripping and daydreams, a world of frustrations and angers, magnified emotions and distorted responses.

The windowpanes on E-3 were painted green, so that during the day the area between the cells and outside windows was permeated with an anemic gray haze. In places where the paint had peeled from the window, shafts of sunlight cut like a knife into the cells. You could see a thin cloud of dust drifting through the sunbeams. And there were starlings. They nested in the rafters overhead, screeching constantly and fouling everything below.

Shower day was a festive time in solitary. It was then that we could actually see the people we had talked to all week. And the messages we wanted to relay to friends could then be given in person.

When we got tired of lying to each other about our fabulous lives "outside"--i.e., our fantastically successful criminal careers, our plentiful and varied amorous exploits, our feats of courage-we would play chess or "20 questions."

In order to play chess in solitary we fashioned the pieces out of soap and numbered the squares on hand-drawn boards from one to 64. Then, from 8 a.m. until lights out at 10 p.m., voices were heard all over the cell block:

"Eight to 18--12 to five--six to seven--nine to 40," punctuated occasionally by a distant voice shouting, "Why don't you punks shut up and go to sleep!"

In the regular population, you have some options-go to the yard, or stay in and read; go to school, church, join the Jaycees; go to the library, lift weights, play handball; draw a $25 coupon book and buy ice cream and cigarettes. In solitary you go nowhere. In the early years you were not allowed to have books.

On the occasions when an injudicious convict volunteered an opinion of a guard to his face, the guard would finish what he was doing-passing out mail, food, etc.-then return with a tear gas canister and empty it on the convict. The guard would then begin to unreel the firehose, but by the time the hose was unreeled the tear gas would have drifted into adjoining cells, and those men would join in to berate the guards. They would all be firehosed.

I spent my 21st birthday anniversary in the hole, in solitary, and it was that night that one of my friends from Algoa reformatory hanged himself in a nearby cell. He was within three months of going home, and he had received word that his wife was divorcing him. On the last burglary he had pulled he scrawled his name on a restaurant mirror with lipstick, and under his name the plea, "Catch me! I can't help myself!"

One way to get out of solitary for a few days was by self-mutilation. In the hospital you could score dope easily, get drunk, see people and just walk around. Seeking such a vacation, I cut my wrist after a month in solitary. Instead of hospitalization I was given 10 days in the hole and first aid for my wound.

What will put a man in solitary?

Being caught with a knife, dope, civilian money, a hack-saw blade, or other things considered serious contraband. Murder. Attempted murder. Rape, sodomy, homosexual activity in general. Escape or attempted escape. Engaging in a work or food strike. Inciting a riot (the administration decides what constitutes "inciting to riot"). And investigation. This last is often the worst, because you may spend many months in solitary and no one will tell you why you are being investigated.

At one time Black Muslim activity was sufficient to get you anywhere from six months to a year in solitary. When the courts recognized the Black Muslim faith as a genuine religion, the prison administrators resisted temporarily, predicting dire consequences, then finally admitted that the Black Muslims were generally a healthy and stabilizing influence among the black inmates.

In the 16 years and eight months I spent at Boonville, Algoa, Jefferson City, Moberly and Church Farm, I spent 2 1/2 years in solitary and 1 1/2 years more in the hole.

I went to the hole more than 30 times at Algoa and Jefferson City, and I consider those the most wasted periods of my life. The theory behind the hole goes back to the origin of prisons-deprive a man of everything he has to live for, and he will somehow repent of his sins.

I went to the hole once for "skating," which consists of being where you're not supposed to be. In my case I had walked to the front of the tier to get a glass of water for another man so he could make coffee.

Other men have gone to the hole for carrying bread from the dining room so they could snack late at night.

The hole at Jefferson City was officially designated "O-Hall." They took your shoes and put you in a bare cell containing only a toilet (it was flushed once every several hours by the guard).

There were 18 cells in the hole. The cells measure about 4 feet by 10 feet. I've seen as many as five men to a cell-two or three is relatively common. You have no toothbrush, since deprivation of personal hygiene is part of the punishment. For 10 days you do nothing.

We used to develop what we called "elephant hide" on our hips. The floor was of terrazzo tile (except for the last three feet, by the toilet, which is dark gray slate). After lying on the floor for awhile the pressure would make your hips tender, and after a few trips to the hole you would develop a dark callous.

They fed us once a day, at 11:30 a.m. We hoarded toilet paper so that we could wrap a sandwich in it for late in the evening. After six or seven days your stomach would shrink, and one meal a day would be sufficient.

The big thing in the hole was cigarettes. The inmate in charge of cleaning the hole (who also had a room there) usually could be bribed to bring cigarettes.

We didn't get cigarettes every day because some guards were more vigilant than others, and the inmate wouldn't be able to pass anything. But when we did score, you could hear such cryptic remarks as, "Man, I sure hope the sun comes out tomorrow," meaning the man talking needed a light.

A disconcerting experience was to wake up in the middle of the night with a two-inch waterbug crawling across your face. This happened frequently, especially late in the evening. If a waterbug came toward your cell, you could take off your shirt and shoo it toward someone else's cell. You didn't want to kill it-for one thing you were in your stocking feet; for another, you had to sleep on the same floor on which it was smashed.

But there is more to prison than the buildings, cells and administrative philosophy (or lack of it). The most important aspect of prison is the relationship of the inmates to each other.

Many in society believe that when a man goes to prison he should have but one thing on his mind-to be "rehabilitated." But life goes on, even in prison. You can't become a robot who has no emotional needs, a sterilized entity who thinks about nothing except an abstraction called "rehabilitation."

A large percentage of the men in prison are serving sentences of 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 years or life. The future, for them, is vague, uncertain, difficult to visualize.

How long can a man suppress his emotions and still retain the use of them?

On entering prison you are advised to "do your own time," which means that you do not meddle in the business of others. If you see a man getting killed, don't get involved. (I've known men who were thrown in solitary for "being involved in a fracas," which consisted of going to the aid of someone who was being assaulted.) There is one exception; the quickest way to make parole is to save the life of a guard who is being assaulted by a convict. The moral, which is not lost on the prisoners, is that you may go to the aid of the guards, but you may not go to the aid of your best friend.

One of the oldest sayings in prison is that "people mistake kindness for weakness." The easiest way not to show weakness is to be as cold as ice. It is a prison truism that the fewer friends you have the better off you are. (Your friends may get involved in something and drag you into it.)

Contrary to what Truman Capote said in an interview in the late 1960s, not all men in prison engage in homosexuality. Thirty to 40 percent would be a more accurate figure-and even this depends on the type of institution.

The more secure the institution, the more homosexuality there will be. The incidence reaches an apex at the maximum security prisons where there is less hope of relief. Also, in the maximum security prison, there will be more "long timers," for whom prison is a way of life. They find their memories fading; after a few years it's hard to reconstruct the faces of the girls you knew. Eventually new sex images begin to appear-those of the surrogate females that are everywhere in the prison world.

I remember celling once with a man who had been convicted on a charge of conspiracy to commit a hired killing. By that time he had been there a few years. One night he said to me, "You know, when I first came in, every time I saw one of these fags I had an urge to smack him in the mouth. But after a while I began to realize I wasn't on the streets any more, and I had to forget everything I ever learned out there if I wanted to live in here.

"In the first place, in here you never know who's who or who's what. Secondly, it doesn't make any damned difference. Out there a fag is a weak sonofabitch. In here, a fag will kill you just as quick as anyboy else. So far as I'm concerned, the only thing I want to know about a guy is if he's a snitch."

Incidentally, this man served more than 10 years without ever getting involved in any way with homosexuality.

Where is the prison administration while all this is going on? The only thing that ultimately matters to the administration is that you don't make waves. If you don't make waves, neither will they.

In general, prison personnel are not trained for the work. More often than not they are afraid of the convicts, and since they spend a large part of their time with the convicts they have a natural desire to be liked by them. To the convicts, a "good" guard is one who is interested in keeping trouble down without making life unbearable for the prisoners.

I remember one three-month period in C-hall when most of the cell doors stayed open from 8 a.m. to lights out at 10 p.m. There were no stabbings, no rapes, no robberies. The convicts knew that the guard was taking a chance, and that trouble in the hall could cause a general tightening up.

Prison employees suffer from the same sort of stereotyping that applies to convicts. The prison guards often are depicted as insensitive and slightly retarded brutes who get their kicks from breaking inmate fingers. A tiny minority fits that description. The rest are simply people.

When I first went to Jeff City The Starting salary for guards was $240 a month, and they wore no uniforms. During the summer crop planting and harvesting months, there would be many vacancies on the guard force, but once the crops were harvested the local farmers would sign on to work at the prison. Prison jobs were known among the farmer-guards as "the milk run."

There was surprisingly little guard-on-inmate brutality. One reason for this was a man named B.J. Poiry; though his actual title was senior guard captain, he was frequently addressed as "Major." He was a blocky, solid man with square chin, known to the inmates as "The Jaw."

Poiry smiled little, was zealous in the performance of his duties, and enjoyed the respect of most of the convicts. During the final years of the Nash administration at Jeff City, Poiry ran the prison. He was The Man.

In late 1964 the Jeff City prison was racked by a series of unrelated killings. Corruption was everywhere. One captain, called "Marrying Sam," was in charge of making cell changes for inmates. If you wanted a cell change you could give the captain's inmate clerk $5 and you would be moved within hours. I remember one 18-year-old boy who changed cells 18 times in a single month.

In late 1964, in a one-week period, one inmate smuggled in 14 ounces of amphetamine, another inmate 2 ounces, and another four ounces. So much dope was available, in so many hands, it was almost impossible to sell all of it. Then, in one 24-day period, four inmates were murdered.

The Nash administration at the prison ended when Warden Nash walked into his bedroom late one night and put a bullet in his brain.

Shortly after I arrived at the Missouri State Penitentiary, Warden Nash called me to the "control center" for an interview. "Maloney," he said, "I've reviewed your record from Algoa. You tried to escape twice, instigated a riot and cut another inmate up. If you behave like that in this prison you'll die in this prison. Either we'll kill you, the inmates will kill you or you'll die of old age. On the other hand, keep your nose clean, and you can reasonably expect to make a parole in 20 or 25 years."

At the age of 19, with many prison years in front of me, my least worry was making parole. I was far more interested in staying alive and maintaining some semblance of dignity. I felt that I had to prove myself-to not show weakness-to the inmates or the administration. This resulted in a hard-headedness that landed me in the hole many times, and in solitary five times, for trying to escape, making zip guns and allegedly stabbing another convict.

By 1965 I was beginning to think in terms of my future, and the possibility of someday making parole. This created a typical dilemma. I had invested five years toward making a "reputation," in the course of which I had also made some enemies. Now that I wanted to devote my time to studying, painting, writing and preparing for the future, I had to keep one eye on the past. Someone I had had trouble with might think I was now vulnerable (the dilemma of my friend Ronnie Westberg), and find some pretext to even an old score.

I eventually developed a frame of mind in which I would try to avoid trouble, and at the same time carry myself in such a way that those around me knew there was a point at which I would not walk away.

Fred T. Wilkinson, former assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, was appointed as the new director of corrections. Wilkinson brought in other former federal prison people, among them Harold R. Swenson, as warden. The new administration took over a prison that had been described as "the bloodiest 47 acres in America," and "a medieval twilight zone."

Under the new administration the food improved immediately. The long metal dining tables were replaced with four-man tables, recreation areas were expanded and cobble-stoned streets were blacktopped. Old buildings came down and new ones went up. "Evening yard" was started during weeknights. Radio and television sets were sold in the prison canteen.

The population at Jeff City began to drop because of the opening of the Fordland Honor Camp and the new medium security prison at Moberly, which ultimately absorbed 800 of the men who would have been assigned to Jeff City.

New dimensions of prison life began to emerge in the late '60s-food strikes; work strikes; racial tension and conflict; civil rights suits .

The first serious incident of racial violence during my years at Jeff City occurred in the summer of 1964. The administration had decided to integrate the prison. It began by moving a small group of blacks to one of the upper tiers of all-white F-hall.

Several days later, as a line of several hundred convicts was returning from the yard through the tunnel in the evening, the line was halted by several hooded men brandishing knives. Several minutes later a commotion started at the rear of the line. One black ran past me and was skewered with an 18-inch knife when he reached the front of the line. He fell dead. Three other blacks were stabbed.

For days there were rumors of an impending race riot, until a group of black leaders met with white leaders and talked the situation out.

There had always been prejudice and discrimination in the prison, but the two races had gambled together, bartered together, played together, worked together, all in relative harmony. Black-white relations were never the same after the incident in the tunnel.

On one occasion, two members of the E-Squad (guards trained in riot control) were standing in the tunnel as the inmates were returning from dinner. One guard called loudly to the other: "Hey, you grab the next nigger that comes along with one of them Afros, and I'll get the next sonofabitch wearing one of those nigger medals [Black Muslim emblems] around his neck."

It was in this kind of atmosphere that prisoners began to file civil rights suits in the federal court.

One of the first, filed by an inmate who'd been in maximum security more than three years, was instrumental in the construction of a small recreation area for the men in maximum security. A few other concessions followed.

In February, 1971, I requested a transfer to Moberly, and arrived there in March.

It was a radical departure from Jeff City. Instead of cells you had a room, and you carried a key to your own room. Instead of a green uniform you wore a grey uniform. You did not have to have a "pass" to go from one place to another-someone simply called and said "send Maloney back to the housing unit."

But it was a schizoid environment. It seemed peaceful, tranquil. When my family came to visit we were no longer separated by bars and screens, but could sit on couches and drink coffee together.

Back in the wings, which were seldom patrolled by the guards, it was a jungle. There was racial trouble of one sort or another at all times. Entire wings-70 men to a wing-would explode with violence. Young boys were raped with regularity.

From the day I entered until the day I left 18 months later I never saw anyone above the rank of guard captain in any of the wings I was assigned to.

When the day came to go to the pre-parole unit at Church Farm, I was happy to leave Moberly, even though I had been treated well there.

I was disheartened when five blacks at Church Farm raped a 22-year-old pre-release unit convict a week after I arrived. The civilian coordinator of the release unit asked me the next day if I would protect the man who'd been raped. I agreed but pointed out that in the event of violence my parole could be jeopardized.

So for the next three weeks I had to escort him to and from the dining room, the commissary, to the yard for exercise. I breathed a massive sign of relief when he went home.

No other problems arose before I, too, came home.

August 25, 2003 The Great Prevaricator by Lona Manning

Sixty-nine year-old Edgar Smith lives an anonymous existence as one of almost 160,000 inmates in the California penal system. At one time, however, he was the most famous prisoner in the United States. His story begins on the other side of the country and almost half a century ago, in the peaceful town of Mahwah, N.J. In 1957, Smith was sentenced to die in the electric chair for the murder of Vickie Zielinski, a pretty young cheerleader whose savagely bludgeoned body was found in a sandpit. The crime and the trial drew national attention. Smith claimed he was innocent and named another man as the killer, but he was found guilty and sent to the Death House in Trenton State Prison. From his prison cell, Smith managed to stave off execution with a series of appeals, and even wrote a book giving his version of the case. He began to correspond with columnist William F. Buckley Jr., who helped him overturn his conviction and negotiate a plea bargain instead of a second trial. At the time of his release in December 1971, he was the longest-serving prisoner on death row in the United States.

Smith's successful transition to the world outside the 20-foot walls of Trenton State Prison lasted only as long as his fame. By 1976 he was in California, broke and drinking too much. That's when a woman named Lefteriya Ozbun discovered the real Edgar Smith, and miraculously lived to tell about it.

Our daughter is missing

One chilly morning in 1957, an anxious couple, man and wife, were slowly driving down a rural road in Mahwah Township. It was early March, and patches of crusty snow still hugged the ground. They were looking for their 15-year-old daughter Vickie, who had disappeared the night before. She had been studying at a friend's house, and had left there to walk home around 8:30 p.m. But she never arrived. Her parents called everyone they could think of, visited all her favorite hangouts, and notified the police. Their daughter was a fun-loving sociable girl, but she had never failed to come home before.

Now that it was light outside, Tony and Mary Zielinski resumed searching the neighborhood for some trace of her. Suddenly, Tony Zielinski hit the brakes. He spotted a shoe, a girl's penny loafer, at the side of the road. The couple jumped out of the car and started searching the side of the road. Almost immediately, they found a flowered headscarf. It was stiff with blood. “Call the police,” Tony told his wife, who ran to the nearest house. Zielinski searched in the bushes and sparse woods, not yet in leaf, until Mary returned, but he found nothing more.

A few minutes later, Captain Ed Wickham of the Mahwah Police Department joined them. The three continued searching on foot along Fardale Avenue, which dead-ended at a sandpit. At the entrance to the sandpit, they found Vickie's red gloves. Then Tony saw rocks with blood on them. A whitish material, which he would later learn was his daughter's brains, was splattered in clumps over the rocks and sand and dirt.

Mary Zielinski later testified, “Then I looked over at my husband and he said, “There she is.”

Their daughter lay crumpled on the banks of the sandpit. Her thick brown hair was matted with blood and caked onto what was left of her skull. Her face was destroyed, a bloody red pulp. Her sweater was pushed up around her neck and her bra was pulled down around her hips.

“And as a result of having seen your daughter at the sandpit,” the prosecutor asked Mary Zielinski at the murder trial, “what did you do?”

“What would any mother do?” she answered, and began to cry.

In fact, she hadn't been able to do what any mother would do -- rush to touch and hold her child. Instead, her husband had put his arm around her and led her away. Their daughter was obviously dead, and they knew they shouldn't disturb the crime scene.

In the first book written about Victoria Zielinski's murder, the author argued that Vickie's parents bore some responsibility for the tragedy. They should have called the police as soon as their daughter Myrna reported her sister was missing, shortly after nine. “[Had] the police been notified..... Vickie might be alive today. But Mrs. Zielinski waited for three and a half hours [before searching for her], during which time her daughter's fate was sealed.”

But the author knew for a fact that this wasn't true, that even if her parents had started searching right away, it was too late. He knew it wasn't true because the man who wrote those lines was the man who killed her. Before her mother even began to wonder where she was, Vickie was running for her life down an unlit country road, trying to get away from Edgar Smith. But he was a 23-year old man, and she was a young girl, only five feet two inches tall, and he caught her, struck her on the head with a baseball bat, and dragged her back to the sand pit. She was dead and discarded by 9 p.m.

Detectives from the Bergen County prosecutor's office were on the scene by mid-morning, along with the local police, taking measurements, snapping pictures.

The news of Vickie's murder spread quickly. Detectives from the Bergen County prosecutor's office were on the scene by mid-morning, along with the local police, taking measurements, snapping pictures. Vickie's body was carried away to the funeral parlor, where the medical examiner noted that her skull was completely “decerebrated” -- she had been hammered so savagely with a large rock that all of her brains had slipped out. He also found bite marks on her right breast, but no other signs of sexual assault. Vickie Zielinski died a virgin.

Within a day of the discovery of Vickie's body, an unemployed mechanic named Edgar Smith became a suspect.

Turned in by his buddies

Joe Gilroy lived in the neighboring town of Ramsey and was one of a group of young men who could often be found hanging around the Paramus Bowling Alley or the Amoco Gas Station. He drove a 1950 light blue Mercury convertible and was generous about loaning it to his buddy Eddie Smith. Eddie took Joe's car on the night of March 5th so he could pick up some heating fuel for his trailer. Sometime after 9 p.m. -- Joe remembered the time because when the phone rang he was watching I Love Lucy -- Eddie called and asked for another favor; he was coming to return the car to Joe, but could Joe please take him, and his wife and baby to the nearby town of Ridgewood? He couldn't get the furnace going in the trailer so they wanted to go to his mother-in-law's for the night. Sure, Eddie, said Joe, and Eddie came to pick him up. Earlier that night, the young men had arranged to get together to have a few beers, but Eddie told Joe he would have to beg off. “I've been sick,” he told Joe, adding he'd vomited all over his trousers and had thrown them away.

By noon the next day, the news about a murder in Mahwah hit the radio. In that peaceful community, word of Vickie's brutal death hit like a seismic explosion. Murders might happen in nearby New York City, but not in that corner of Bergen County, where everyone knew each other. Joe Gilroy heard about Vickie's murder from his pal Don Hommell as they were driving to Ridgewood to pick up the Smiths to take them back home to the trailer park. Don was 21 and, like Eddie, had served a stint in the Marines. Don knew that Eddie had used Joe's car the night before. He was joking, sort of, when he told Eddie that the police were looking for a Mercury and they were going to check all the Mercurys in Bergen County. He noticed that Smith got “a startled look on his face.” Joe later said Smith turned pale.

Naturally, on the drive back to the trailer park, the talk was about Vickie, whom they all knew. “Guess what,” Don remarked, “When I was coming home from work last night I seen Vickie's sister walking up the road and I blew the horn at her.” In the back seat, Eddie's wife Pat shivered and hugged her two-month-old baby closer. It was creepy to think that something like that could happen right in their neighborhood, a mile from their home. She would tell Eddie that they wouldn't spend the night in their trailer -- they should go back to her mother's, even though they had to sleep in a foldout army cot. It was just too scary to stay at the trailer court. But when they got home, Eddie told her he was going into town with the guys. He said he was going to get a haircut and he took the shoes he'd been wearing yesterday with him. “I'm going to get these re-soled,” he told her. Pat didn't protest. Eddie was always leaving her alone at home while he went out with his friends; that was just the way things were.

Instead of going straight into town, Hommell detoured past the sandpit and drove slowly by. The three young men craned their necks to see what they could see of the most sensational story to hit the area in years. Half-a-dozen policemen were swarming around, searching the surrounding area and taking measurements. Hommell, Gilroy, and Smith waved at them. The policemen waved back.

“Boy, when they get this guy they're gonna hang him,” said Don.

“No, he will probably plead insanity,” said Eddie.

Their detour took them past the Zielinski house, where Vickie's heartbroken parents were making arrangements to take their daughter's body back to Pennsylvania, where the family came from, for burial in St. John's Roman Catholic cemetery in Honesdale.

Once in town, Edgar bought a newspaper and parted company with his friends. The papers reported that Bergen County Prosecutor Guy W. Calissi called Vickie's murder the “most vicious, most brutal and the most sadistic I have ever seen.” The police were going to question soldiers at a nearby Army base, the article said, but Calissi believed that the killer must have been someone Vickie knew. The pretty young sophomore was nervous about walking home alone in the dark along the poorly lit rural road, which is why she had asked her younger sister to walk out from home and meet her. She was unlikely to have gone off with a total stranger.

Later that evening, 24 hours after the murder, Joe Gilroy noticed a speck -- could it be a drop of blood? -- on the front seat of his car. “I started to suspect [Edgar Smith],” he later testified. “I wasn't sure. I couldn't believe it.” Feeling worried, feeling maybe a little foolish, he talked it over with his friends -- Tony, Willie, Rocky and Don. Don Hommell went to the pharmacy where he worked as a delivery boy and asked his boss if they had anything that could test for bloodstains. There is evidence that Gilroy and Hommell also searched around in the fields by the Pulis Street Bridge for Smith's trousers, where he told Gilroy he'd discarded them. But in the end, Gilroy decided he'd better take the car to the police and let them do the investigating. The police responded quickly to the tip and before midnight, Smith was picked up for questioning and taken to the Mahwah police station.

“Things turned sort of red and then black”

Edgar Smith, a good-looking, slender young man with dark blonde hair and light blue eyes, sat across from Cap. Carl DeMarco and Asst. Prosecutor Fred Galda. Smith later described himself as a “kid... [who] didn't know anything. Life was sitting in Tony Savarino's Amoco gas station and drinking $2-a-case beer and reading the New York Daily News. That was the world.” Smith's articulate, precise manner of speaking belied his lack of education. He was a high-school dropout who had quit or been fired from at least five jobs since he was discharged from the Marines. In fact, he'd been fired the day before from the automotive place he'd worked at for only a week. He hadn't gotten around to telling his wife yet.

Questioned about his whereabouts on the night of the murder, Smith related how he had borrowed his friend's car to pick up kerosene for the trailer and how he couldn't get his furnace going. But from the very beginning, Smith's answers sharpened the detectives' interest in the young man. No matter how many times they went over his movements of the night before there was a little gap of time unaccounted for. He left his trailer at around 8:20, drove to the Secor gas station and bought five gallons of kerosene. He left the gas station around 8:30. He'd gotten back to his trailer around 9 p.m. So if it took him five minutes to drive to the gas station, and five minutes, give or take, to buy the kerosene, why did it take half an hour to drive back home?

Smith was asked for the clothes he'd worn that night. His shirt and jacket, well, he'd just washed those at his mother-in-law's place. What about his trousers? He didn't have those anymore. You see, he'd been sick with some kind of a virus and when he was driving home, he had to throw up. He had quickly pulled over in front of St. Luke's Church, jumped out of the car, and thrown up all over his pants. No, he couldn't show them the pants because he had thrown them away. Where? He'd tossed them out the car window. No, he didn't go home with just his underwear on. No, he'd gone home, changed his pants, gone out again to pick up Joe Gilroy, taken the pants with him and then tossed the pants out the car window.

The detectives took Smith so he could show them where he'd thrown up, and where he'd thrown the pants. They found nothing. And where were his shoes? Oh, he'd thrown them away too -- in town. Smith was hustled back into the police car. By that time, it was almost 3 a.m. The shoes were located in a garbage can in downtown Ramsey.

Yes, he could explain the blood on the shoes. It was because of his scraped and bloody knees. He was in the trailer, getting another pair of shoes from under the bed, and he'd kneeled on the shoes to avoid getting blood on the carpet and -- how did his knees get scraped? That was from when he quickly got out of the car to vomit. He'd tripped on the curb. The scrape on his hand was from when he was repairing a tail pipe.

Perhaps because Don Hommell had told him that the police had analyzed the tire tracks at the scene of the crime, Smith also offered that he had stopped the Mercury at the entrance to the sandpit. He had thrown up there, as well. He was taken to the sandpit and the police searched the entrance area with their flashlights. No sign of anyone being sick. Smith refused to go with them further into the sandpit. He said he had never been back there.

By this time, the reporters camping out at the police station sensed that the police had zeroed in a suspect. Over 30 men and boys had been questioned, anyone the police could think of who knew the Zielinskis or might have known Vickie, but it was Edgar Smith who was kept all night long and who was escorted, at 5:30 in the morning, to the prosecutor's office in Hackensack. Smith also realized that the detectives were focussing on him. “If you are looking for a fall guy, why don't you grab [Don] Hommell?” he suggested at one point during his lengthy interrogation. (Hommell was, in fact, questioned that night. He said that he'd been at his delivery job for a Ramsey pharmacy, and had gone out of town to pick up supplies from another drugstore. Thirteen-year-old Myrna Zielinski saw him speeding by her on his way back. After work he went to a tavern, where a number of people saw him.)

At 6:45 a.m., the Ramsey Police Department called to say that they had found a pair of khaki pants in the woods off of Oak Street. Confronted with the pants, Smith denied they were his. The police then brought in his wife Patricia, who identified them as belonging to her husband. The police folded the legs of the pants up before showing them to her, so she had no idea just how incriminating her identification was. The trousers weren't stained with vomit. They were stained with blood from the knees down. In the pants pockets, the police found a rolled-up pair of socks. One sock in particular was heavily soiled with blood and dirt.

Nothing gets a detective's attention better than catching a suspect in a lie. The detectives believed they had Smith cornered. They had a footprint impression taken from the sandpit. They had his shoes, his pants, his socks, and they wanted his confession.

By 10 a.m., Dets. Charles DeLisle and Walter Spahr were trying the “good cop/bad cop” approach with their suspect. Spahr found a spot of blood on the t-shirt Smith was wearing under his shirt and Smith admitted that he'd worn that t-shirt the night before. Spahr bored in on him. Don't give me that b-s about cutting yourself shaving, Smitty. You don't have a cut on your face. You're a smart guy, so you've got to know that we can test this blood. Your blood type is “A,” Smitty, and heaven help you if the blood on your clothes matches the Zielinski kid's. We can even match the dirt on your sock to the sandpit.

DeLisle, the good cop, leaned forward confidingly and asked, “What did the girl do to you, Eddie?” Suddenly, Smith's confident demeanor disappeared and he answered plaintively, “She hit me!”

“Where did she hit you?”

“In the face,” answered Edgar Smith, and burst out crying. He smoked a cigarette and the police let him regain his composure. Then he asked for a priest that he knew from his old high school.

By noon, Smith was giving a sworn statement, which was tape recorded and taken down by a court stenographer. He admitted that he had been with Vickie on the night of March 6th. He was driving back from the service station and passed Vickie on the road, walking home. She had waved at him, and he offered to give her a ride. She started talking about troubles she was having at school, and asked him to continue driving past her house because she didn't want anyone to see her in the car with him. They continued down the road, turned round the bend and ended up several miles away in the sandpit. Suddenly, and according to Smith, apropos of nothing, Vickie said, “I am going to get out and walk home. I am going to tell my father. I am going to tell him you are like the rest of the guys.” She tried to leave the car, he grabbed her arm. She swung at him, he hit her back. The last thing he remembered was scuffling with Vickie, he said. After that, “things turned sort of red and then black,” and “by the time I had gotten into the car I had completely forgotten about the whole thing. It wasn't in my mind at all. Just like it never happened.”

Smith's lengthy statement was vague and ambiguous. It was not exactly a confession. He admitted to striking out at Vickie, but couldn't remember if he'd actually hit her. “I vaguely picture myself running or chasing somebody,” he said, then later added, “I think I recollect running in the sand with my shoe off.”

He confessed to disposing of her purse and schoolbooks in the woods, even to returning to the sandpit to retrieve one of his shoes. But he didn't know if he had struck her with a rock. When he heard about her murder the next day, “that's when it dawned on me that I had been with her the night before and something snapped in the back of my head that I did it and I know it in the back of my head.”

The details of Smith's semi-confession were released instantly to the media, but by the time the statement was brought to him in his jail cell for his signature, several days later, he refused to sign it.

While awaiting trial, Smith had three psychiatric examinations, in which he repeated that he didn't remember exactly what had happened at the sandpit: One report noted: “He thinks he may have struck [Vickie] with his fist. He reported that at this time there was a flash in his eyes. He saw various colored lights and that he has a complete loss of memory for everything that happened until he was pulling into his driveway at home.”

The doctors didn't buy the blackout story and reported that in their opinion, Smith was a liar and a sociopath: “Patient's expressed amnesia for the act for which he stands accused is not consistent and does not fit into any pattern of known illness in which amnesia may take place.”

Prosecutor Guy Calissi learned that Smith had a prior conviction as a juvenile for attempted sexual assault on a 9-year-old girl. He'd received five years of probation for that offense. Lawyers for the Marine Corps also visited Bergen County and reviewed Smith's stint with the Army in California and Hawaii, checking to see if there was any connection between any unsolved crimes in those jurisdictions. For example, Smith had gone AWOL for five days when serving in Hawaii. But no charges were ever laid for any other crimes.

Justice moved swiftly in Bergen County in those days, and Smith was brought to trial within two months of the crime. But in that two months, he had time to try and think of ways to explain away all the incriminating things he'd said, and to explain why Vickie's blood was on his pants and shoes.

The Trial

Edgar Smith was charged with first-degree murder, in that he “did willfully, feloniously and of his malice aforethought, kill and murder Victoria Zielinski, contrary to the provisions of [New Jersey law] and against the peace of this state, the government and dignity of the same.”

The case was the biggest crime story of the year in New Jersey, and Prosecutor Calissi decided he'd better handle the trial himself. He had been present for part of the time when Smith was being questioned, and permitted Smith to go out to a restaurant for dinner, without handcuffs, with the detectives, after he was finished giving his statement. Smith ordered the lobster and had a cigar after dinner.

The first witness was Myrna Zielinski, Vickie's younger sister, who was supposed to walk with Vickie on her way back from her friend Barbara's place. Myrna described how she walked nearly a mile to Barbara Nixon's house without meeting up with her sister. Myrna cried as she identified her sister's varsity jacket and cardigan sweater, stiff with blood and spattered with gore.

Her mother and father followed her to the stand and described how they found her broken body lying on the bank of the sandpit. Fifteen-year-old Barbara Nixon then testified how Vickie had come over that night after supper and how they had worked on their bookkeeping homework together and listened to the radio. (In March of 1957, Elvis Presley had a big hit with Hound Dog. Another favorite was Tab Hunter, crooning Young Love.) Around 8:30 Vickie said she had to leave to meet up with her sister Myrna. Vickie asked Barbara if she could borrow a scarf to wear home. The black kerchief she was wearing belonged to her sister, who would be angry if she knew Vickie had borrowed it. Barbara lent her a gray kerchief with flowers on it. Barbara testified that she saw her friend to the door and watched as she walked down the driveway and past the white fence. She was the last person to see Vickie alive apart from her killer.

During the next few days of the trial, a string of detectives took the stand and testified how Smith's lies about vomiting on his pants fell apart when he was forced to confront the blood on his trousers, socks, and shoes.

It appears that when he gave his vague statement, Edgar Smith was trying to feign insanity, some kind of blackout or multiple personality disorder. When that didn't convince anyone, he changed tactics for the trial. Smith's defense was that yes, he had picked up Vickie and given her a ride and yes, that was her blood on his trousers, but there was an innocent explanation. He had lied during his interrogation, then given a vague statement that seemed like a confession, to protect his family from his buddy Don Hommell – the real killer.

The truth was, Smith testified, that on his way back from the gas station that night, he had seen Vickie walking along the road and she had waved at him to stop and told him she had something to tell him. She directed him to drive past her house, until they came to the sandpit. It turned out that the spiteful minx wanted to tell him about some nasty gossip concerning his wife Pat. Smith got angry at the girl and ordered her out of the car. He turned his head around to carefully back up the Mercury and when he looked back, Hommell's car was there and Hommell was with Vickie and she was crying and bleeding from a cut on the head. Smith had driven off and left them there. Later that night, he had run into Hommell in town and Hommell told him to be quiet if he valued the lives of his wife and child. He didn't understand what the threat meant, because at that point he didn't know that Vickie was dead. But when the police picked him up and started to question him, he realized that his family was in danger. That's why he didn't mention Hommell in his sworn statement. That's why he had made up that story about Vickie slapping him and saying she was going to tell her father. That's why he said he had vaguely remembered running in the sand, and that's why he had thrown Vickie's purse into the woods. He had lied and covered up his activities that night, not to hide his own guilt, but so he could buy time until he could figure out his next move and protect his family from Hommell.

But, Calissi asked Smith, when you were being questioned, you told a roomful of detectives “that if we wanted a fall guy we should get Don Hommell -- what was this fear that you talk about?”

“I explained that,” Smith answered nonsensically. “I was afraid that my wife and child -- he would do the threats that he made.”

“But you had already told us that we should arrest Hommell.”

“I didn't tell you to arrest Hommell.”

“You said, if you wanted a fall guy, get Hommell?”

“That's right.”

“Is that right?”

“That's right.”

Another angle Smith tried at trial, and at a subsequent appeal, was that because Vickie had cut her head just before he left the sandpit, he felt responsible. He should have taken her to the hospital, and when he first learned of her death, he assumed that she had bled to death from the cut on her head. That's why he had told the police: “Something snapped in the back of my head that I did it, but I couldn't convince myself.” Because, you see, he only learned that her wounds were horrible -- far worse than a cut on the head -- after giving his strange statement to the police. It was only when he learned the details of her injuries after his arrest, that he realized something more must have happened after he left the sandpit.

But, asked Calissi, isn't it a fact that you read the newspaper on the day after the murder? (The article said that her skull had been crushed by a rock, and her nose and jaw broken.) So you knew her wounds were severe before the police picked you up.

Oh yes, said Smith, but “I never take a newspaper to be accurate.”

Prosecutor Calissi patiently and methodically pursued Smith's corkscrewing lies.

Q. How did the blood get on [your] shoe, do you know?

A. I do not.

Q. Do you recall on the night of the 5th of March at Mahwah when you were being questioned... did you or did you not explain that the way the blood got on the shoe was by you kneeling on the shoe to get your other shoes?

A. I did.

Q. And could you tell us how you account for the difference in the statement that you make now?

A. I didn't want to make any definite statement at that time... and therefore I was evasive.

But Smith's statement about kneeling on the shoes was definite. It was his answer at trial that was evasive.

And the jury had already heard about how Smith first said he'd scraped his knees when he got out of the car to vomit, then he admitted to falling and scraping his knees in the sandpit when he was there with Vickie, and now at trial he was saying he scraped his knees when he fell off the fence beside his trailer. They knew he could change his story at the drop of a hat.

Smith's salvation depended on the jury finding him credible. But he didn't know how to win them over. The defendant said of himself that “I am by nature a transcendentally unemotional, matter-of-fact individual, the antithesis of what a man testifying in his own behalf, with his life at stake, should be.” His descriptions of his actions were a little too precise at times. Where another man might have said, “I slipped off the fence railing when I tried to pour the kerosene into the tank,” Edgar Smith said:

I poured the kerosene into the drum, some of it had spilled on the side of the drum, it was slippery. I leaned my hand against it and slipped. I couldn't land on my left foot because of the ankle being injured and by landing on my right foot my knees buckled and I fell on the gravel driveway next to my trailer.

Smith's worst failing as a witness for himself is that he didn't seem to have any conception of decent human behavior. He told the jury that he, a married man, took a 15-year-old girl to a sandpit -- to talk, only to talk -- and left her there in the dark and the cold when she angered him, and refused to let her back into his car even when she begged him, and clung on to his legs, crying and bleeding freely from a cut on the head. He testified that she pleaded with him “don't let him [that is, Hommell] do it again,” but that he had driven off and left her there because, well, she was Don's girlfriend, wasn't she, and it was best not to interfere.

(The blood on the pants legs, type “O” blood, Vickie's blood, was splashed on the pants, not smeared).

In addition to his disgust over the murder itself, Calissi was angered at Smith's calculated efforts to cast the blame on Don Hommell, who was in effect put on trial by Smith and his attorney. Hommell had to take the stand and testify to his movements that night. He denied having seen Vickie or threatening Smith to keep quiet. He'd been out of town, picking up medicine from another pharmacy and got back to town just as his shift ended at 9 p.m. Yes, he acknowledged that within minutes of the time that Vickie had disappeared while walking down Wyckoff Avenue, he had driven down the same road. Hommell also testified that he had dated Vickie “casually,” but her parents reported that she had no steady boyfriend.

Calissi called detectives to establish that Hommell's car and clothing had been checked the day after the murder and had come up clean. In his summation, Calissi said, “this has been a horrible, despicable attempt on the part of the defendant himself to create a doubt by concocting and by fabricating, by inventing this terrible story about a friend in order that he might save himself from the punishment which he deserves.”

Calissi reminded that jury that Smith had testified that when he had supposedly seen Hommell with the crying, bleeding, Vickie, “he was definite it was Hommell's car” at the sandpit. But, Calissi pointed out, the owner of the pharmacy had testified that young Hommell drove the pharmacy station wagon, not his own car, when he made deliveries.

Calissi's son, Ron, 10 years old at the time, was in the courtroom that day. ” I can remember being in the courtroom and seeing how the defense lawyer threw up his hands at that point. That blew the case, [Smith] had absolutely no credibility after that.”

The prosecutor described Smith as “cool as a cucumber,” a man who was completely unmoved by the story of Victoria Zielinski's brutal murder as it unfolded in the courtroom. “We are dealing here,” Calissi concluded, “with a very cunning man who sits here before this jury and this court for over two weeks, doesn't bat an eyelash, shows absolutely no sign of sympathy or remorse and believes that this is just one of those things.

“My stomach and my heart, well -- it feels the way I know it feels and I know there are others in this courtroom that feel the same. The only person that seemed unconcerned [about Vickie Zielinski] in this court was Smith himself. He is the only one that didn't think this was anything of great importance, the only one.”

The jury deliberated only two-and-a-half hours, including a lunch break, and found Smith guilty as charged. They concluded that this seemingly intelligent, controlled man had dark furies within him that led him to punish a 15-year-old girl who rejected him, to bash her face with a large rock until she had no face left. Judge Arthur O'Dea told them, “I want to commend you on your verdict. If it had been the court's decision without a jury I would have found the same as you found... you as jurors should feel no responsibility for the sentence which.... is mandatory, the death penalty.”

Smith commented to Prosecutor Calissi upon leaving the courtroom, “I'll fry in July.”

The Death House

At that time, New Jersey's death-row inmates were kept in a separate building in the yard of Trenton State Prison. Tommy Trantino, sent to the Death House in 1964 for the brutal murder of two policemen, recalls: “It only held 18 men. There were nine cells to a tier, two tiers in a shoebox shaped building, at the end of which was the electric chair behind a big green steel door. Edgar Smith was in the last cell and was right next to that door.”

“I would not see the sky for nine and a half years,” Smith later wrote. “I would spend [those] years in a small, sparsely furnished solitary confinement cell, getting out only fifteen minutes each Friday for a quick cold-water shower.” Prisoners ate, slept, and waited in their cells -- no exercise in the yard, no work details.

The condemned could hear but not see each other, because all the cells lined one side of the building and faced a plain green brick wall. Three men made the trip through the green metal door to the electric chair during Smith's years there, but he never developed close ties to any of them. Even after 14 years on Death Row, he described them as “guys I knew, not friends.” The feeling was mutual, recalls Trantino: “Actually nobody really liked him at the time.” Smith thought he was superior, Trantino explained, and “took an elitist position on the other guys,” and for that matter, toward “the world,” not just his fellow prisoners.

This assessment is echoed by long-time Trenton prison guard Harry Camisa, who wrote in his memoirs that Smith, although clearly intelligent, was “an arrogant, mean-spirited lowlife... who talked down to everyone he met. He seemed to believe he was some kind of superior being.” Most of the other inmates “hated his guts.”

By his own telling, however, Smith was humbled by being in the Death House and used the endless hours to take stock of himself. “ He claims he deeply regretted the fact that up until the night of his arrest, he had basically loafed through life. “I was no longer a free, screw-the-world 23-year-old hanging around gas stations, drinking with other guys like myself, doing what I wanted when I wanted whether anyone liked it or not.”

To pass the time, he did jigsaw puzzles, worked out baseball statistics, painted, took correspondence courses, joined MENSA (the organization for people with high IQs) and read everything he could get his hands on, all while orchestrating a series of appeals.

His wife Pat remained loyal for almost five years. Perhaps if he'd been executed, she would have stayed by him until he went through the green door. But his skill in staying alive meant that she existed in limbo. In 1962, she told him that she needed to get on with her life. She remarried, took their daughter, and moved away.

By 1964, his mother couldn't afford to pay any more legal bills, so Smith became his own jailhouse lawyer. “It is incredible what one can do when one's life is at stake,” he later wrote. He laboriously hand-printed his legal briefs because he wasn't allowed to have a typewriter. His appeals attacked Hommell's alibi, and argued that the statement he'd made under oath but never signed, should have been inadmissible. Smith also made much of the fact that the medical examiner estimated the time of death as being around midnight. (In fact, fixing the time of death was complicated by the fact that it was very cold that night, causing rigor mortis to set in earlier than it would otherwise. The examiner didn't analyze Vickie's stomach contents to help settle the question of the time of death).

His appeals were dismissed as nitpicking. “Defendant's conduct and general demeanor,” wrote one justice, “reflected a noticeable consciousness of guilt.... Why did Smith inform Gilroy that he had vomited on his trousers... Would a clear conscience have dictated an attempt to conceal Victoria's books and handbag and his own bloodstained socks and trousers in the woods? Normal conduct would have been to drop the socks and trousers into the garbage can outside the trailer and to return the books and pocketbook [to Vickie's house] at a later date.”

When his appeals failed, he appealed the appeals. His case came before the New Jersey Supreme Court four times. In 1959 he had one of many close calls. He was scheduled to be executed just a few days after the New Jersey legislature was going to vote on abolishing the death penalty. The bill was defeated, but Smith survived, winning another appeal of his sentence in the nick of time.

Unlike other famous prisoners, like the Trenton Six or Sacco and Vanzetti, there were no political overtones to Smith's case. He wasn't a persecuted minority. He was a white male, about to become, in a phrase not yet coined, a Dead White Male. If there was to be any public interest in his case, he had to dredge it up for himself. But Smith had an extraordinary stroke of luck in 1962. A staffer on the National Review, Donald Coxe, saw a newspaper article about Smith, which mentioned that he was a faithful reader of the magazine. Smith was offered a complimentary subscription, (with a bit of gallows humor, it was called a “lifetime” subscription). The prisoner began corresponding with Coxe and then with William F. Buckley, the magazine's founder. Both soon took an interest in the details of the case, especially after Smith told them that a private investigator was working for free, trying to find new evidence that would prove his innocence.

In 1963, Coxe wrote in the National Review that he had read and re-read the trial transcript. “The jury's verdict was not clearly perverse, nor was the trial obviously rigged.” In fact, he conceded, “[t]here is much evidence against Smith,” but Coxe and Buckley came to believe that there were many “unanswered problems” in the state's case.

Buckley decided the prosecution case was “inherently implausible.” Smith was supposed to have come across Vickie as she walked home, invited her into the car, driven two miles to the sandpit, and made sexual advances to her. She then escaped from the car and tried to get away. He pursued her, caught her, dragged her back and killed her in a savage fashion. A few minutes later he was back at his trailer a mile from the death scene, calling from the bedroom to the kitchen, asking his wife to throw him a clean pair of pants. She didn't notice anything unusual in his manner. And this had all happened in half an hour. Perhaps it was physically possible to do all that, but it was hard to conceive of someone engaging in an impulsive crime which climaxed in savage hatred toward his victim, and cooling down enough to plot his cover story and dispose of his bloody pants, in the time allotted. The Smith that Buckley knew through his letters wasn't violent or even excitable, not even in the shadow of the chair. As Buckley wrote: “Doesn't it strain the bounds of credibility that an essentially phlegmatic young man, of nonviolent habits, would so far lose control of himself, in the space of a minute or two, as to murder under such circumstances a 15-year-old girl he hardly knew?”

Adding to their sympathy for Smith was their resentment that the trial judge would not permit them to visit him in the Death House because they were neither family nor legal counsel. Their relationship was carried on by correspondence. Buckley was eventually allowed to visit Smith, but in accordance with the rules, he had to sit five feet away from Smith's cell with a wire screen placed between them, while a guard listened in on the conversation. (These visiting restrictions also applied to Smith's relatives. According to the Death House prison guards, Smith ordered Patricia to not wear any panties when she came to visit him, and she had to sit with her legs spread and her skirt hiked up so he could glimpse her pudenda through the mesh screen. The prison guards were repulsed by Smith's callous attitude toward his pretty young wife, and -- as Harry Camisa wrote in his memoirs -- figured that Smith was a “sleaze” who had pulled a “con job” on Buckley.)

Though Buckley thought the State's case was problematic, he also recognized that Smith's version, or versions, lacked the ring of truth. Why, for example, would Vickie ask him for a ride, when she knew that her younger sister was walking up the road to meet her? “Surely Vickie would get into greater trouble at home,” Buckley wrote, “by letting [her sister] Myrna walk all the way to the Nixons and back without Vickie, than by letting her sister see her in a car?”

It was possible, Buckley surmised, that Smith killed Vickie in a rage. Smith had testified that he'd gotten angry at Vickie because she told him that his wife was fooling around on him. Therefore, wrote Buckley, perhaps Smith did lose control and kill the Zielinski girl, but that did not warrant the death sentence: “If a gentleman tries to seduce a lady, and she declines to go along, that is not a provocation which justifies him in killing her other than at the risk of conviction for a premeditated murder. If, however, the lady suggests the gentleman has been cuckolded, that is a provocative statement, and any lethal reply by the gentleman -- in a fit of blind rage -- may be classified as murder in the second degree.” In which case, Buckley concluded, Smith should have received a life sentence for second-degree murder, not the chair.

Buckley wouldn't have taken such an interest in this prisoner, out of all the prisoners who claim innocence, if it hadn't been for Smith's intelligence as revealed in his letters, all printed in an even, controlled hand. “[Smith] was by turns mordant, judicious, inquisitive, impudent, amused,” Buckley later wrote, “but what was distinctive was his sense of detachment, which he combined with a kind of gallows wit, that left some readers mysteriously but deeply moved.” The high-school dropout succeeded in capturing and holding the attention of one of America's foremost intellectuals. Buckley thought so highly of Smith's writing that he offered to buy the literary rights to Smith's letters, for possible publication. By this time, however, Smith was working on a book about his case, and he declined the offer.

Smith's case came to national attention when Buckley wrote a lengthy article for Esquire magazine, which was published in November of 1965. In it, Buckley detailed his doubts about the plausibility of the state's case, but he also repeated some of Smith's claims: he wrote that Smith's juvenile conviction for sexual molestation was as a result of a false accusation from a girl who frequently made false accusations. And he repeated Smith's contention that Don Hommell was the real killer:

Smith said he told Hommell during their brief conversation... on the night of the murder just where he had discarded his pants. The woman who occupies property across the road from which Smith claimed to have thrown the pants... swore at the trial that she had seen Hommell rummaging there the day after the murder. The pants were later found [by the police] near a well-traveled road... Did Hommell find them, and leave them in the other location, thinking to discredit Smith's story, and make sure they would turn up?”

Hommell was exonerated by the Bergen County jury, only to find himself re-accused by a famous writer in a prominent magazine. The insinuations dogged him for years. He left New Jersey sometime after Smith's trial and found employment as a prison guard at a juvenile facility in Delaware. In 1964, some of the boys accused him of assault, but he was exonerated after an investigation.

In 1968, Hommell was again tried in the media when Smith's book, Brief Against Death, was published. Don Hommell “went through hell and never recovered from it,” recalled Bergen County prosecutor Edward Fitzpatrick. “He had to move away from this area, the area where he grew up and where his family lived.” Fitzpatrick concluded that Hommell was “another victim of Smith.”

Brief Against Death

Brief Against Death came out to good reviews. “[Smith's] presentation of the evidence is convincing, superbly argued, coolly reasoned,” said Newsweek. In it, Smith repeated the story which had failed to impress the jury -- that when police questioned him, he had lied because Don Hommell, the real killer, had threatened him. Actually, Smith presented two conflicting arguments. One, he gave his strange confession because he was sleep-deprived, feeling sick, and was browbeaten for 21 hours straight by the detectives. He hardly knew what he was saying. He would have confessed to being on the grassy knoll and shooting JFK, if they'd asked him. Or, alternatively, when he gave his confession, he chose his words with cunning and care, because of the threats of Don Hommell. “I made up my mind to give the police a misleading, ambiguous statement, to try to outsmart them.” In fact, he deliberately threw in false details about his movements that night because “I was hoping to confuse things a bit.”

Just as he gave several explanations for his sworn statement, Smith provided more than one substitute villain. In addition to pointing the finger at the hapless Don Hommell, Smith also hints that Vickie's father, Tony Zielinski, was some kind of pervert and that she was terrified of him. In his first statement to police, Smith told them that Vickie said, “I am going to tell my father -- you are like all the other guys.” In Brief Against Death, Smith wrote that Vickie said, “I am going to tell all the guys that you are like my father.”

In addition, Smith quotes his lawyer as making the pointless, repellent accusation that the 15-year-old virgin “engaged in abnormal sexual practices,” but that he “would never raise that issue.” In his opening paragraph, Smith suggested that his victim was a tease:

“Five foot two, 120 pounds, with brown eyes and dark brown shoulder-length hair, she was an exceptionally well-developed 15-year-old, with a figure that belied her age -- a fact she knew, was proud of, and made no effort to conceal. To the contrary, her favorite clothes were tight, form-revealing sweaters and blue jeans.”

The single most damning piece of evidence against Smith was his bloody trousers, found tossed in the woods. In his sworn statement he admitted that the tan khaki trousers were his. But he retracted that for his book, and claimed the detectives confused and tricked him into saying that the pants were his. But, he wrote, his own pants were gray and weren't so bloody. The police must have faked this evidence or Hommell must have planted them where they could be found.

What he didn't mention is that when he was on the stand at his trial, he admitted to Prosecutor Calissi that the bloody pants were his.

In fact, Smith barely mentions his lengthy and devastating cross-examination in his book.

Ironically, though Brief Against Death became a best seller and convinced a lot of people that an innocent man sat on New Jersey's death row, the book had the opposite effect on Smith's defense lawyer, John Selser. Selser had argued strongly at trial that Don Hommell was the true killer, but when he read the book, he noticed how Smith “found it so easy to distort the facts.”

Justice is a moving target

Smith's final and successful appeal in 1971, his 19th, wasn't about his guilt or innocence but about whether he had received a fair trial. It centered on the statement he'd given to police on March 6th, 1957.

For years, he had protested that his confession was obtained under duress, and that the police had kept him from seeing a lawyer. In fact, he was never even told when he stopped being just one of the many people the police were questioning about the Zielinski murder, and when he started to become the chief suspect. He wrote:

[O]nce the police have fixed upon a prime suspect, once they begin seeking evidence to convict that suspect, rather than seeking general information to help solve the crime, that suspect becomes in fact a criminal defendant and a whole new ballgame begins; all sorts of legal protections come into the game, including prompt arraignment before a magistrate and warnings as to the suspect's rights..... [The] police had a good enough case against me to arraign me long before they did so, long before they allowed a magistrate to advise me of my rights, and that that delay resulted not from an attempt to solve the crime, but rather from an effort to build a better case by continuing my interrogation until I made incriminating statements.

Over the years, the New Jersey courts had ruled that Smith had not been mistreated and that the transcript of his statement indicated that he was speaking freely and willingly. One dissenting judge, however, expresses Smith's position in a nutshell:

[F]rom 8 a.m. on the morning of March 5, 1957 until 3:45 p.m. on March 6, 1957 -- almost 32 hours -- [Smith] had no sleep with the exception of a couple of hours before he was taken from his bed and placed in custody at 11:30 p.m. on March 5; [then] he was interrogated in relays by prosecutors and their aides, local police and county detectives, as many as seven seen being present at one time, all through the night, relieved only by his being taken to various places in freezing weather... [to look for the pants and shoes].. and questioned repeatedly until 10 a.m. on March 6 when he broke down completely and cried and asked for a Catholic priest....

Smiths' interrogation and confession was obtained eight years before the famous Supreme Court Miranda decision, which guaranteed that all suspects be informed of their rights: (“You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney...). Standards and expectations for the treatment of suspects had evolved since 1957. Smith had the added advantage of being famous. He'd published two best-selling books, Brief Against Death and a crime novel about a man who is wrongfully convicted of murdering a girl. He had attracted the best appeal lawyers available. He was famous, his case discussed in the pages of Esquire and National Review, Time and Newsweek.

Smith had argued this point before in the appeal courts, but had lost. In 1971, Smith won the right to discuss the whole thing in court again, before U.S. Federal Judge John J. Gibbons in U.S. District Court.

Edward Fitzpatrick appeared for the State of New Jersey. (Guy Calissi was no longer prosecutor at this time and was in private practice.) Fitzpatrick argued that Smith had been treated with elaborate courtesy. A doctor had examined him midway through the questioning. The assistant prosecutor personally lit his cigarettes. In fact, the record showed that Smith told his interrogators that he had been treated “better than I expected.”

But this time, the prosecution lost the argument. In June 1971, Judge Gibbons ruled that Smith's statement had been unfairly obtained, and ordered that the State of New Jersey either release him or re-try him in 60 days. And this time around, they wouldn't be able to use the statement, which Calissi had used with such devastating effect to show the jury what a fluent, if not always persuasive, liar Smith was. The state appealed the decision but lost.

In public at least, Smith was insisting that he wanted nothing more than a fair trial and that he would never waver in proclaiming his innocence. Behind the scenes, his lawyers were negotiating a deal. “And that is how the game is played,” Smith wrote in his second book about his case. “You say one thing in public, another in the back room.”

Bergen County offered to release him if he would plead non vult (no contest) to second- degree murder. He had served 14 and-a-half years and he could be released on parole. Smith decided to accept the offer. Neither side particularly wanted to go through another trial, prosecution witnesses had died or moved away, and the outcome couldn't be certain. As Smith recalled: “Bill Buckley and I discussed [what to do] at great length over a period of months, and I found that he fully shared my confidence that if I were to make a deal with the state, a deal the result of which I would be required to plead guilty in order to obtain my immediate freedom, those who believed in me, who believed me innocent, would understand that what I had done had been a strategic necessity, a charade performed to get me OUT.”

On December 6, 1971, Edgar Smith stood before New Jersey Superior Court Judge Morris Pashman and confessed to the murder of Vickie Zielinski.

“Did you, on the night of March 4, 1957, pick up Victoria Zielinski?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you kill Victoria Zielinski?”

“I did,” the defendant answered quietly.

“Did you kill her by yourself?” (undoubtedly a question on behalf of Don Hommell).

“Yes, sir.”

“Was there anyone else present?”

“No, sir.”

Smith also acknowledged that he had been wearing the tan khaki pants and that he'd discarded them near Oak Street, where they were found.

Pashman noted that viewed objectively, the murder of Vicki Zielinski, though gruesome and savage, was not necessarily a premeditated murder. Pashman told Smith that, in his opinion, the only reason that Smith was found guilty of first-degree murder was because Smith was such an obnoxious defendant -- the jury reacted strongly to his many lies and his cold-blooded attempt to pin the murder on another man.

Pashman also took comfort in the assurances of the state-appointed psychiatric experts who declared Smith to be rehabilitated. One psychiatrist wrote that there were: “No manifest disturbances in either his emotional make-up or his mental processes. It is quite evident that the defendant examined today is a different man than the one who entered the death house 15 years ago.” Three psychiatrists had examined him before the trial and declared him to be a sociopath, but sane. But the current court-appointed expert reported, “this defendant may be returned to the community without posing a danger to the public... The overall picture looks quite promising and the prospects for the future are good.”

His first destination after Judge Pashman's court room was via limousine to the set of William F. Buckley's television show, Firing Line.

The Edgar H. Smith who emerged from prison was 37 years old and starting to look a little jowly, a world-weary man as opposed to the attractive boy he once was. He'd gone to death row in 1957, the era of Elvis, duck tail haircuts, and Ozzie & Harriet. He emerged in the era of Archie Bunker, long sideburns, and Vietnam. (Thanks to his supporters, he had fashionable new threads for his court appearance.) His first destination after Judge Pashman's court room was via limousine to the set of William F. Buckley's television show, Firing Line, where he fielded questions from his host and the audience and explained that what had just gone on in Pashman's courtroom was “theater.” “I said what I was requested to say... something I had to do to get free.”

After Smith's conviction, Guy Calissi had said, “I would stake my own life that Edgar Smith is guilty.” Now, the man he had sent to death row was not only being released, but regarded as a symbol of justice gone wrong.

Ron Calissi, Guy Calissi's son, found the whole thing very hard to bear. The 25-year-old civil servant remembered the night in 1957 when his father came home, grave and silent, after arresting Smith. Seeing Vickie's killer held up as a “national hero,” offended the younger Calissi's sense of justice and decency. On a more personal level, Calissi deeply respected his father and Smith's book charged that Guy Calissi had put an innocent man on death row. People would ask him, “so, do you think Smith was innocent after all?” and Calissi thought: What you're asking me is whether my father is a murderer. “There was no doubt in my father's mind that Smith was guilty... he never would have asked for the death sentence if there had been any doubt.”

Ron Calissi decided to fight back against the favorable publicity wave for America's favorite ex-con. He interviewed many of the witnesses such as Joe Gilroy and Don Hommell. He compiled the court documents -- transcripts, psychiatrist reports, summaries of Smith's many failed appeals. It came to over a thousand pages. He had it published as a book he called Counterpoint. Calissi refrained from analyzing or synthesizing the information. The reader could read the trial transcripts, compare them to Brief Against Death and judge for themselves how Smith “distorted the facts, fabricated outright lies, used half-truths and arrogantly held law officials and the courts up to ridicule...”

Counterpoint, published in 1972, a few months after Smith's release from prison, showed that Smith's version of the case was in fact quite distorted. Calissi reprinted the entire text of Smith's March 6th statement to police, the disputed confession. Smith had printed a highly edited version in Brief Against Death. For example, the transcript of the confession contains this passage about Vickie's attempted escape from Smith after she told him that she was going to “tell her father:”

Q: Did [Vickie] get back into the car with you?

A: No, no, then that time whatever happened in between is just vague to me. I don't know exactly what it is.

Q: Did you chase her at any time?

A: I have a feeling of running somewhere.

Q. What was the condition of the ground at that time?

A. Soft.

In Brief Against Death, Smith omits the damaging remarks about running, and wrote that Asst. Prosecutor Fred Galda asked “Did she get back in the car with you?” and then, “changing the subject,” asked about the “condition of the ground.”

Smith also left out his admission that he threw Vickie's pocketbook and schoolbooks into a wooded area near the sandpit, that he swung his fist at Vickie “as hard as I could,” and his admission that he knew his pants were covered with blood. He cut out the portions which demonstrated that when he gave his statement, he was probably trying to convince the detectives, or himself, that he was temporarily insane. He edited out phrases like, “that's where somebody pulled the switch,” and “things turned sort of red and then black.” He also edited out the occasions where his questioner said “please,” “thank you,” “take your time,” or “would you like a cup of coffee?,” making his interrogation sound far more brusque than it actually was.

The trial transcript, reproduced in full in Calissi's book, included Smith's testimony that he had asked for a Catholic priest before giving his confession, whereas in his book he accused the police of foisting a priest on him when “[t]he only thing I've asked for is to see either my wife or my lawyer.”

Despite the younger Calissi's efforts, Edgar Smith remained the most famous and widely quoted ex-convict in the country.

Life after prison

“Edgar's very first year out of prison was dreamlike,” William F. Buckley wrote. “He was a considerable celebrity. He earned a thousand dollars at a clip lecturing at colleges...

Smith had once written, “There is perhaps nothing more frightening to me than the prospect of finding myself stuck for the rest of my life in some dreary small town, working in some gas station or hardware store for $60 a week.” By 1974, he was broke and worse, he was yesterday's news. He moved to La Jolla, Calif., where he briefly found work as a security guard. He was fired.

As he entered his 40s, Smith was unemployed, in debt, and drinking heavily. He was remarried, to a much younger woman. When Paige Smith first met her future husband, he was driving a gold-colored Cadillac, hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, and writing for The New York Times. Most of his money came from his involvement with the drug trade, she later claimed, and the glamorous people that she met through him turned out to be drug dealers. If so, then this career fizzled out like all the others. By the time they moved to California, Paige was urging him to take a job, any job, like driving a taxi, until he found a career that was suitable for his talents. While she worked full time and went to nursing school at night, he was loafing around doing nothing, a dead weight in their marriage. The bills mounted up. They argued.

The second assault

Lefteriya Lisa Ozbun was a 33-year-old immigrant who worked as a seamstress at a clothing factory. A petite brunette, she was waiting in the company parking lot for her husband to pick her up one October afternoon in 1976. As a working mother of three, spare time was a precious commodity for her and she had just enjoyed a few relaxing hours of window shopping. But she'd resisted the temptation to buy anything and her paycheck was still in her purse.

A car slid up behind her, so close that she instinctually moved away from the sound. Suddenly a strange man grabbed her throat with one hand, and held a knife under her chin with the other. As she recalled, “He put [the knife] at my throat and he squeezed it real tight and he said, ‘Don't make a move and don't scream or I'm going to cut your throat right here!'”

The man hustled Mrs. Ozbun into the car and taped her wrists together. “Where are you taking me? What are you going to do to me?” She demanded.

“I'm going to take your damn money and I'm going to stick that knife in you,” he answered.

She believed him. "I could see it in his eyes," she said. "I'd never seen eyes like that. They were so cold and filled with hate. I knew if I didn't fight I'd never see my kids again."

So, as her captor sped along the freeway, she fought back. She was wearing the platform shoes fashionable at the time, and they turned out to be handy battering rams for punching the front windshield. Smith (for it was, of course, Edgar Smith) flailed out with one arm, grabbed her head, pushed her down on the seat and sat on her as he tried to keep the car in motion. In her desperate determination, Mrs. Ozbun tore and twisted the tape off her hands. Smith kept steering with one hand as he stabbed a six-inch knife in her side, barely missing her heart. “I looked down and the knife was in me, with his hand still on it. I tried to pull the knife out but couldn't.” Still she fought back, fighting her abductor for control of the brake pedal, the steering wheel, and the horn. Smith finally lost control of the car and swerved to an exit ramp. He nearly plunged them down a steep embankment but managed to stop the car in time.

Luckily, there was a young man at the side of the highway, selling flowers. He saw Mrs. Ozbun roll out of the car with the knife still embedded in her side. He ran up to her. She asked weakly, “Will you please get my purse?”

Unable to fully comprehend what was going on, the young man did as he was asked. He walked over to the car, and politely asked Edgar Smith for the lady's purse. Smith too, was stunned by the turn of events. He handed out the purse and then, recollecting himself, drove away at full speed. But some other witnesses got the make of the car and the license plate. The Pontiac was registered to a Paige Smith.

Smith fled San Diego and disappeared. Two weeks later, he called William F. Buckley's office, saying he was hiding out at a Las Vegas hotel, and asked Buckley's secretary to help him. Buckley promptly turned him in to the FBI. Smith was 42 and had been out of prison not quite five years.

Diagnosis: Sane but deadly

As news of the crime and the capture spread, journalists understandably turned to Bergen County for their reaction, and questioned how an intelligent man like William F. Buckley could have been hood-winked for so long by a high-school dropout. Buckley wrote, “[t]he former assistant prosecutor [Edward Fitzpatrick] did not suppress his glee, giving statements to the press and addressing an open letter to me all but accusing me of knifing Mrs. Ozbun myself.”

Others who had championed Smith were also angry and amazed. John Selser, Smith's original attorney, bitterly remarked, “He made a damn fool out of me.”

Smith's second attack proved to be another embarrassment for the predictive abilities of psychiatrists, who had assured Judge Pashman that Smith “may be returned to the community without posing a danger to the public.” Even so, Smith's court-appointed attorney, Thomas Ryan, asked for more psychiatric examinations for his client. Ryan felt Smith's only chance lay in pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, because the evidence against him was overwhelming.

But Ryan had to abandon that strategy because the psychiatrists reported that Smith was rational and intelligent. He was not psychotic or delusional and so he couldn't be judged as insane.

The case was assigned to Deputy D.A. Richard Neely, who was in charge of the Major Violators Unit in the San Diego County D.A's Office. Neely did not know at first that Edgar Smith was a celebrity. “I had never heard of that guy before... a few days later, that's when I first found out that Edgar Smith was more than the ordinary, run-of-the-mill crook.”

Leftiyera Ozbun survived the knife attacked and lived to testify against her assailant. Neely admires her courage: “He picked the wrong victim. He really did. She was a very slight woman, and I think he saw the back of her and thought he had an easy mark, and that was far from the truth.”

Since Smith and his attorney had to abandon the insanity defense, they turned to a strategy that was even more desperate and surprising: Smith pleaded that he was an emotionally disturbed sex offender. This was because the penalty in California at that time for kidnapping for purposes of robbery was a life sentence, if the victim was injured. Kidnapping for the purpose of sexual assault meant a shorter sentence. Thus, Smith denied that he kidnapped Mrs. Ozbun with the intention to rob her. He testified he was planning to rape her, in hopes of receiving the lesser penalty.

To buttress his claim that he was a sex pervert, he pointed to his past -- he confessed to assaulting a girl when he was a teenager (a charge he denied in Brief Against Death, when he said that the girl had a habit of making false accusations) and affirmed that his attack on Vickie Zielinski was sexually motivated.

Before, when it suited him to lie, he lied. Both his lies and his confession were weapons in his campaign to get out and stay out of prison. Truth, lies, it didn't matter and it was all the same to Smith. Just words, really.

Even when Smith finally told the truth, there remains the doubt that he would ever, could ever, honestly describe what happened during Vickie Zielinski's last few moments of life or show any awareness that he was speaking of another human being. She was walking home alone in the dark, watching for her sister to join her. Smith lured her into the car on some pretext. (It seems unlikely that it was she who asked him for a ride, especially since he was travelling the other way, back to the trailer court, when he passed her after she left the Nixon's house). He took her to the sandpit, where not much time could have elapsed before she realized the danger she was in and tried to get away. She ran down Fardale Avenue and was within 70 feet of Mr. Kromka's driveway (the same home her mother visited to phone the police after her shoe was found), when Smith caught up to her. Joe Gilroy had some baseball bats lying in the back seat of his car, and Smith had grabbed one and pursued her. “I hit her a couple of times with the bat. I didn't know how badly she was injured.” He dragged her back to the sandpit. She may have still been struggling at this point, because one of her shoes, her scarf, bobbie pin, a hank of her hair and her gloves were found along the road. Once back at the sandpit, “I picked up a very large rock and struck her on the head with it.”

Once he got home, Smith changed his clothes, which led to the first lie he told that night. He told Joe Gilroy that he'd been sick on his pants, probably because he was worried that Gilroy would wonder why he'd changed clothes that evening. Later, when the police found his trousers, splattered with blood, he had to make up a new lie to explain why he'd lied to Gilroy. He'd been telling lies ever since.

Smith tried to persuade the judge that he was confessing to the truth, not out of self-interest, but because his conscience troubled him: “For the first time in my life, I recognized that the devil I had been looking at the last 43 years was me,” he said.

But Smith's delivery of the line probably lacked the necessary humility and remorse. Neely's recollection of Smith on the stand was that of “arrogance.” “He's very cocksure of himself, thinks he's smarter than everyone else. That's the demeanor that I recall.”

Smith was found guilty of kidnapping with intent to rob, and attempted murder. Mandatory life sentence. However, the following year, California's penal code was revised and Smith became eligible to apply for parole in 1982.

Parole attempts

And so it began again. The quiet, persistent voice that refused to yield. His crimes had taken only moments, but he devoted years to arguing his way out of them.

In 1979, he sued his wife Paige for divorce on the grounds of her mental cruelty to him. In 1988, he filed suit for libel against Ron Calissi and Paige after they wrote to the parole board, advising against his release. His suit was tossed out of court. He appealed it. In 1990, he tried to get his conviction for slaying Vickie Zielinski overturned. The motion was denied.

At one point he even tried to convince a reporter for the Los Angeles Times that Lisa Ozbun's near-murder was not his fault. The New Jersey courts shouldn't have let him out, and since they did, what happened was their fault. Never mind that he had single-mindedly tried to get off of death row for 14 and-a-half years and had filed 18 appeals.

"Don't ask me why I did it," he wrote. "Ask those self-righteous public servants why they gave me the opportunity to do it. Ask them why they did that to Lisa Ozbun. And ask them why they did that to me. Those are the questions they aren't going to want to answer, but which need answering, which Lisa Ozbun and I need answered."

His greatest accomplishment in life was deceiving so many intelligent people for so long. It was a point of pride with Smith that he never said, point blank, that he was innocent of Vickie Zielinski's murder. (For example, in Brief Against Death, Smith wrote: “Did justice triumph? Is Edgar Smith guilty? If at this point the reader cannot respond with an emphatic ‘yes,' then I shall consider this book a success.”) As he told Neely, “I never denied the crime.”

Not in so many words.

In 1980, in a rare moment of candor, he told a reporter, “I was caught in this terrible but wonderful lie. Terrible because I had to lie, and wonderful in the literal sense of the word because I used to sit and wonder how people could believe it. And then I started to believe it, and that was the scary part of it.”

More recently, prison therapy has given Smith a whole new vocabulary of emotional cliches to add to his repertoire in front of the parole board: “Living with yourself.... is a prison in itself and that's the one I have to get rid of.”

Dr. Robert D. Hare, one of North America's foremost experts on sociopaths, writes: “Most therapy programs do little more than provide psychopaths with new excuses and rationalizations for their behavior and new insights into human vulnerability. They may learn new and better ways of manipulating other people, but they make little effort to change their own views and attitudes or to understand that other people have needs, feelings and rights.”

Ron Calissi is not interested in the fact that Smith has had months of counseling and therapy in prison. There's no cure for being Smith, he believes. “When are people going to finally realize Edgar Smith can't be trusted?”

Smith married a third time while in prison, which Neely notes, could also be regarded as part of his ongoing exit strategy. “It's not that uncommon for life offenders to marry while they're in prison and come to the board and say... ‘Now look, I'married, I'm rehabilitated, I've got a parole plan, I've got a wife.'”

A life long smoker, Smith has had several heart attacks and is in failing health. So far, the parole board has turned Smith down. He is not eligible for mandatory parole. Every time Smith comes up for parole, the Bergen County prosecutor's office contacts the California parole board and reminds them about Vickie Zielinski, about how she ran for her life, how she was caught and dragged back to the sandpit. About how Smith bashed her head in and then dragged her over the rocks, as her brains spilled out. Dead for over 40 years, she hasn't been forgotten.

Smith's ex-wife Paige and Lefteriya Ozbun also tell the parole board that Smith should never be released: “He killed one girl, got a second chance and then tried to kill me,” Ozbun told the Los Angeles Times. “I don't want him released. Ever. I don't want anybody else to go through what I went through.”

"Edgar is a master at manipulating the system," Paige told a reporter. "He manipulated his way out off death row in New Jersey. He conned Bill Buckley. And now he's doing in California what he's always done. He's working the system, until the odds are in his favor for parole. But people should realize that his last victim is very lucky to be alive today. The next woman he goes after may not be so lucky."

Prosecutor Neely, who attended every parole hearing for Smith until his retirement in 1995, believes Smith should stay behind bars for life. “He's committed two horrendous crimes that speak for themselves.... How many chances do you get?”

Smith's next interview with the parole board is scheduled for February 2004. He will be 70 years old.
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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Ron Calissi, now a member of the New Jersey Bar and executive associate dean at Fairleigh Dickinson University, for his generous assistance and for permission to reproduce photographs from his book, Counterpoint: the Edgar Smith case. Counterpoint is out of print but is available through used book dealers.

Some of the quotes used in this article originally appeared in magazine and newspaper accounts of this case, including articles by Miles Corwin for the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times, a February, 13, 1980 article by Ellen Dean Wilson for the North Jersey Herald & News, and various articles which appeared in the Bergen (County) Record.

William F. Buckley reflected on the case of Edgar Smith in an article available in the book, Right Reason.

Edgar Smith's two books about his case are Brief Against Death and Getting Out. He is also the author of a novel called A Reasonable Doubt.

Former Trenton prison guard Harry Camisa's memoirs, Inside Out, co-authored with Jim Franklin, is available through Windsor Publishing.

Dr. Robert Hare's book, Without Conscience: the disturbing world of the psychopaths among us, Guildford Press, 1999, lists the common features of psychopaths and uses many case studies to illustrate their utter selfishness and manipulation of others. Hare explains that those who use the term “psychopath” may incline to the view that these people are born without a conscience, while those who use the term “sociopath” believe that these people are a deviant product of society.
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Notes
An online memorial for Vickie Zielinski has been established at the “Find A Grave” website.

William F. Buckley declined to be interviewed for this article on the grounds that he has nothing to add to what he has already written about the case.

Edgar Smith did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this article.

Smith was at one time the longest-serving inmate on death row in the U.S. His record -- 14 years -- has since been surpassed. The average length of time an inmate spends on death row today is around 10 years. ' Target=_Blank>Link