Almost Midnight (29 page)

And there they were Thursday morning when Darrell was escorted down the courthouse corridor, more than forty strong, lined up awkwardly along the walls. Some of them hadn’t seen Darrell in years; few could recall him looking quite so respectable. Clean-shaven, his hair slicked back, and wearing an ill-fitting tan jacket over a white shirt and brown tie, he smiled and raised a hand in greeting, happy to see there were people from his past who hadn’t yet given up on him.

The prosecution called just four witnesses during the penalty
phase, saving their trump card for last. Jim Spindler, Jack Merritt, and Lee Stephens took the stand, Jim and Jack for the second time each in the trial, and then Chief Deputy Jerry Dodd of the Stone County Sheriff’s Department, the same Deputy Dodd who had videotaped the crime scene no more than an hour or so after the killings. Justus and McCullah wanted to play Dodd’s gruesome footage now for the benefit of the jury, and Judge McGuire gave them the go-ahead, over the strenuous objections of the defense. Wendt argued that the video was superfluous, and also wildly inflammatory. The jury had already looked at stills of the crime scene; they’d already heard graphic testimony from the pathologist, Jim Spindler. Was it really necessary, Wendt asked, that they now be subjected to this five-minute horror film, with its depiction of “head wounds wherein most of the cranial cavity is removed and exposed with the brain tissue outside of the head?”

The jury viewed the video, as grisly as advertised, and then Wendt went to work, calling one character witness after another, each one hopeful of finding the right words, the magical phrase, that might persuade the jury to spare Darrell’s life. Although impressive in sheer numbers, the exercise fell decidedly flat. The overall effect was rather like a procession of out-of-town mourners showing up at a funeral parlor in a strange city to pay respects to a deceased they barely knew. Part of the problem, of course, was that many of the witnesses had lost touch with Darrell over the years and they were frankly mystified by the frightful turn his life had taken. For the vast majority, moreover, Judge McGuire’s courtroom was strange and forbidding territory. They were coming in cold, without truly knowing what was expected of them. Most hadn’t exchanged so much as a single word with Bill Wendt prior to being thrust on the stand.

So there they were, Darrell’s brigade of well-wishers, done up in their Sunday best, giving it their utmost, but unable to muster the words that might have turned the tide in his favor. Only two or three succeeded in breaking through the stifling formality of the courtroom with a breath of insight; a glimpse into the life of the
man the jury knew only as a murderer. One of these was Danny McCrorey, a dairy farmer who had had only brief and sporadic contact with Darrell since high school.

“Now, how far did you stay in school with Darrell?” Wendt asked.

“Twelve years,” McCrorey answered. “We graduated together.”

“And did you socialize with him, go to any other places or have other meetings?”

“We—cave explorers, you know, we done a lot, we was together a lot. We went to church together. That’s been—like I say, the twelve years I was around Darrell quite a bit. He was a—what stood out to me about Darrell was, I was taught to do right when I was growing up but I didn’t do the things right. But now Darrell—he was taught by the same rules, his mother went to church where mine did, but Darrell drew a line when it come to drinking, anything. I never knew of Darrell saying one cuss word the whole twelve years of school. And that’s why Darrell stood out in my life and that’s why I’d like to say everything I could to help Darrell because he was a number one guy.”

“You’re here to try to save his life, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

Alma Tolbert, one of Darrell’s many aunts and the youngest of Frank and Lizzie Mease’s seventeen children, did a feisty turn on the stand, raising eyebrows with her talk of blood bounties and family treachery.

“Do you remember about the time that Darrell went into the military service?” Wendt asked her.

“Yes.”

“Prior to that time what kind of reputation did he have for being a law-abiding citizen and Christian and a good schoolboy?”

“Well, I would say one of the best.”

“And what’s his reputation now insofar as the people in the community say with regard to truthfulness? Good or bad?”

“Well, they don’t very few if any holds anything against him.”

“And you’re thinking now in terms of the Lawrence deaths, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Prior to the Lawrence deaths, did you ever hear of any threats against Darrell?”

“I certainly did.”

“What did you hear?”

“I heard he had a ten-thousand-dollar price on his head, just to tell him which direction he went in, and he told our relation.”

“He did what?”

“It was told to my relation, he asked my relation to give him the directions, if he knew where he went, he was on the run.”

“By whom, who told you that, your family?”

“My nephew, he was a friend of Lawrence. I think, to be honest, they had dealings.”

Darrell’s mom spoke on his behalf, as did his sons Shane and Wesley, and finally, in one of the trial’s odder developments, Darrell took the stand. He testified for several minutes, nothing earthshaking, answering questions about his family background and military service, taking the Fifth on anything having to do with the Lawrence killings, and then Wendt, McGuire, and the two prosecutors adjourned to the judge’s chambers to thrash out a technical point of procedure.

Sitting up there alone, Darrell cast a sidelong glance at McGuire’s bench: he almost did a double take. Impossible, he thought. A snub-nosed .38 in a holster, strung up in the kneehole under the bench, clearly visible from where he was sitting. Right there, right there, easily within his grasp. With a snap of the fingers, he could have the .38 in his hand, ready for business.

Tempting, unbelievably tempting, but Darrell wasn’t up to it. Most of the fight had been knocked out of him since the arrest in Arizona. Not only that, some quick figuring convinced him it was too good to be true. It had to be a setup. Why would the judge have left the .38 within easy pouncing distance of a mad-dog killer and a noted pistolero? There could be only one answer: McGuire had wanted him to see the gun. He’d been banking on him making a lunge for it in a last desperate bid for freedom, assuming Darrell would jump at the chance to blast his way out of the courtroom and
onto the street. The only problem was, the gun would be unloaded. Sure, plain as day, it had to be unloaded. Get him to take the bait, face down the courtroom with an empty pistol. This would be an excuse for the plainclothes troopers standing along the back wall to kill him right there. That way nobody would have to worry about the jury voting against the death penalty. Or maybe an honest appellate judge ordering a new trial. Gun him down, take care of business here and now, save everybody a lot of trouble.
Convicted murderer killed trying to escape
. Was anybody going to protest?

Puzzling it through, the pieces started to come together. They were all part of it: McGuire, the prosecutors, even his own lawyer. Why had Wendt put him on the stand in the first place? To ask a few piddling questions of no value whatsoever to the case? And why had Wendt and the rest of them cleared out of the courtroom, leaving him up there all by himself? Easy: they knew the deal was on and they didn’t want to be caught in the line of fire. Everybody was trying to play him for a sucker. Not this time, though. This time he’d seen right through it.

With Darrell opting out of a courtroom showdown, there was nothing other than for the trial to advance to its final stages. While acknowledging in his summation that the Lawrence killings were “the worst [he’d] ever seen, no question about it,” Wendt pleaded with the jury to spare his client’s life, arguing that Darrell was a fundamentally decent person whose moral sensibilities had been crippled by a tragic chain of circumstances, beginning with Vietnam and ending with his entanglement with Lloyd. “Mitigating circumstances, no question about it,” he said. “Think about those mitigating circumstances. In thinking about [them] you can even think about any fact, any fact, in the first stage of this case, in the second stage of this case, which would soften the ultimate verdict. You can even say, Well Darrell, you deserve to die, but I just don’t want to take you away from your boys even though they can only visit maybe once a month.

“Don’t play God,” he concluded. “There’s not a God on this jury. You have the right, but don’t play God.”

Now the prosecution’s turn.

“The worst he’s ever seen,” Jim Justus said, making Wendt swallow his own words. “The man said, in thirty years it’s the worst he’s ever seen. We’re standing here today saying, we agree. It’s one of those times, one of those few times where the law allows the imposition of the death penalty.” Neither Vietnam nor paranoia nor anything else save “the oldest motive in the world” was behind the killings, Jim insisted. Darrell was motivated by greed, pure and simple. He was determined to take over Lloyd’s drug empire, and nothing was going to stand in his way. “And I say for the final time that’s why as a prosecuting attorney of Taney County, Missouri, I can stand up and say he deserves to die. Because the law and the facts say so and because you said you could follow it if this is the case. It is.”

Close to two hours later the jury reached a verdict, which McGuire read aloud to the packed courtroom.

“We the jury, having found the defendant, Darrell Mease, guilty of murder in the first degree of William Lawrence, now assess and declare the punishment at death.”

Darrell showed no emotion. He sat stock-still, avoiding eye contact with the jurors as they left the jury box and filed past him.

Lexie caught up with Jim Justus by the courtroom door. “Do you realize you’ve just done what you’ve accused Darrell of doing?” she said to him. A couple of minutes later, sitting alone on a bench in the corridor, a picture of grim dignity in a pale blue dress, she told reporters that she’d said a prayer for the jurors when they started deliberating and another one when it was all over. “I think that this was handled wrong because had it not been split up it would’ve been a whole different story, and I feel that Darrell has really been railroaded,” she added.

Asked by the press for his parting words, Jim Justus said, “When you have a brutal homicide such as this, with that much drugs involved, and that much premeditation, with mutilation of the body, I could in good faith stand up and look that jury right in the eye and say, ‘This man deserves to be put to death.’ ”

When Darrell was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs and a chain around his waist, the media scrum in the corridor wasn’t expecting him to stop and talk. Up to this point, no one in the press, outside of Michelle Beth Katzenell more than a year earlier, had been able to coax a single word out of him. But with the death verdict in, Darrell decided that the time was right to deliver a brief message.

“Mary is my friend,” he said, microphones and notepads snapping to attention, “and I’m proud of her for telling the truth.” His armed escort jabbed him in the ribs, trying to get him to move along, but Darrell managed to squeeze in one more sentence. “Jesus Christ is my best friend,” he said, “and I trust God now more than ever before.”

And that was that. Back in his cell Darrell picked up a snapshot of Mary, smudged and crinkled, and whispered, “Someday, I will be with you.” Then, sitting there on his rack, eyes closed, his mind seized on a passage of Scripture, Mark 11:23–24: “I solemnly assure you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and has no inner doubts, but believes that what he says will happen, shall have it done for him. I give you my word, if you are ready to believe that you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer, it shall be done for you.”

Reciting the passage silently, caressing the words, he suddenly felt a sweet and luxuriant sensation washing over his body, almost as if a bucket of warm oil had been poured on his head and then soaked down to his knees. He’d never experienced anything like it, but from his Pentecostal boyhood he was almost certain he knew what it was. A Holy Ghost confirmation: in this hour of need, the Holy Spirit was anointing him with strength and resolve and passionate purpose.
They’ve just pronounced the death penalty on me
, Darrell thought.
It doesn’t matter. They can put a thousand death penalties on me and it doesn’t make a difference. I’m walking free and I’ll be reunited with Mary
.

Bill Wendt wanted twenty-seven grand to handle the appeal. The well was almost dry: no way at this stage could Lexie come up
with that kind of money. A few days after the death penalty was handed down she came to see Darrell with the bad news. “We’re not abandoning you but that’s a lot of money,” she told him. “We’re going to have to figure out the best way of proceeding.”

Darrell was momentarily jolted. He’d grown to like and trust Wendt. Over the past year, almost despite himself, he’d put quite a bit of faith in the smooth-talking attorney. But thinking it over later that day, he decided that a clean break was probably for the best. He didn’t need Wendt starting out; he certainly didn’t need him now. No sense confusing the issue: God was his lawyer, and God was going to carry this thing through to its miraculous conclusion. “I don’t care if the janitor handles the appeal,” he told Lexie over the phone the next morning. “God can’t be stopped.”

A couple of weeks later Darrell and Wendt met briefly in a conference room in the basement of the Greene County jail. By this point Wendt had already filed a motion for a new trial, standard procedure after a homicide conviction, and he wanted to know definitely one way or the other where he stood with Darrell.

“I’ll be fine without you, Bill,” Darrell said. “God is my lawyer.”

“That’s good,” Wendt shot back. “You’re going to be needing all the help you can get.”

Part IV

CHAPTER TWELVE