Almost Midnight (35 page)

No one knew the angles on death-penalty appeals better than Kent Gipson—though seeing him for the first time you’d be hard-pressed to guess it. Baby-faced and pudgy, and hanging out most days in sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt at his office bungalow on the south side of Kansas City, he could easily give the impression of a graduate student in no big hurry to finish his thesis. Listen to him talk a few minutes, however, and the truth came crashing through. Not many graduate students had seen the things Kent had seen. For almost a decade, he’d been a key player with the Missouri Capital Punishment Resource Center, an agency founded in 1989 for the purpose of providing expert legal representation for poor people on death row. Kent knew all the guys on Missouri’s death row and had been involved in most of their appeals. Some of them he liked, some he didn’t. Some he thought had been unfairly convicted, others he wouldn’t relish bumping into on the street. All of them, without exception, he was committed to keeping alive. Fighting the death penalty was Kent’s passion. He was accustomed to putting in sixty hours at the office Monday through Friday, and then cramming in extra hours on weekends. For Kent it was the work above all else, driving out to Potosi in a car he knew was running on borrowed time, not making nearly enough money to think of buying a replacement, not caring about the car, not caring about the money, the work was enough, the work was its own reward.

So of course Kent had said yes when Laura asked for his help. Kent always said yes, and, besides, he had some added incentive for working on Darrell’s case. He’d grown up in Stone County, the
oldest of three kids. His dad was the town barber in Crane, just twenty miles up the road from Reeds Spring. Kent remembered some of the outlaws that Darrell had fallen in with, guys such as Lloyd Lawrence, Bill Gold, and Kendall Schwyhart, guys with big reputations as badasses and the don’t-mess-with-me swagger to match.

“These guys were larger-than-life characters where I was raised,” he said recently, sitting in his office behind a desk stacked with legal files. “They did pretty much as they pleased. The local cops were afraid of them. Unless they committed a major felony right out in front of the police station, the cops would leave these guys alone. Plus there were the rumors, about the local sheriff being on the take, deputies being on the take, which meant, if the rumors were true, that Lloyd and the boys had a lot of room to operate. As far as I could tell, the rumors were well founded. So Darrell’s story hit close to home. I had no trouble believing that Lloyd had done terrible things to him, and was planning on doing even worse, and that Darrell had good reason for not going to the police.”

Teaming up, Laura and Kent put their very best material into the petition to the Supreme Court: the highly irregular jury instructions at trial, whereby jurors were denied the option of convicting Darrell of murder in the second degree; the troublingly long time it took before Darrell saw an attorney after being apprehended in Arizona; the questionable legality of the arrest warrants. And when it all came to naught, and the Court turned down the petition without comment, Laura was disconsolate. This was rough news, the roughest yet, and she found herself making the lonely drive to Potosi not knowing how she’d break it to Darrell.

She needn’t have worried. Darrell spent their hour together trying to pick up
her
spirits. No reason to feel disappointed, he said. She’d given it her best shot. She’d done all she could. She was first-rate all the way. Plus, it really didn’t make a speck of difference, the Supreme Court turning them down. It didn’t change a thing. He wasn’t going to get executed—no chance in the world. Might as
well sit back and enjoy the ride, he told Laura. Things were heating up. Things were bound to get interesting.

I
T WAS A
few weeks after Laura’s bad-news visit that a prison official delivered the death warrant to Darrell’s cell in the hole. The guy might as well have been delivering a dozen roses, for all Darrell cared.

Bring it on, brother
, he said to himself.
Hallelujah, bring it on. This just forces matters to a head
.

Once a death-row prisoner received a firm execution date, the usual procedure at Potosi was to take him out of population and put him in protective custody. In the protective custody unit, isolated and monitored round the clock, he’d be certain to stay alive until the appointed hour. No chance of suicide, no risk of getting shanked out in the yard. Prisoners on the row delighted in the macabre irony of the arrangement, the institution going to so much trouble to prevent some condemned guy from dying prematurely and thereby cheating the executioner.

Darrell had a firm execution date of January 27, two and a half months hence, and since he’d spent most of the past three years in the hole anyway, protective custody was a romp in the park. It was like moving into a higher rent neighborhood—quieter, more decorous; it even had a better view from the window. As another bonus he also got his personal property back, the radio and other stuff that had been confiscated when he was exiled to the hole. The first thing he did on settling into his new cell was to turn on the radio and pick up a song by a Christian recording artist named Clay Crosse. “It must have been Your hands,” the chorus went,

Turning my world in perfect time
I know it was Your hands
Holding my heart in our design
.

This was the first song Darrell had heard in three long years, and it was all he could do to contain his emotions. He knew the guards
would be coming soon to bring him to the prison psychiatrist, standard procedure for a guy who’s just been given a kill date, and he didn’t want them or anyone else seeing him choked up and red eyed. He didn’t want anyone mistaking the joy he was feeling right now for something else—least of all fear or uncertainty. He wasn’t afraid, and he’d never doubted, not for a second, that he was going to escape the death chamber.

The psychiatrist asked Darrell if he wanted some medication to relieve the strain and anxiety. Keep the meds, Darrell said. He’d never felt better. He wanted to experience this ride with a clear head.

“I’ve got one bit of advice for you,” the psychiatrist said as Darrell was leaving. “Don’t give up hope.”

Darrell grinned and said thanks.

He couldn’t help but note the irony. This day of all days, the very day his kill date had come down—it was shaping up as his best day ever in prison.

Later on Darrell was called out of his cell to have his picture taken. For publicity purposes and so forth, Potosi liked having on file an up-to-date shot of any prisoner who was slated for imminent execution. Something gray and sober, preferably, something befitting the gravity of the occasion. But Darrell wasn’t feeling gray and sober. He was out in the corridor joking and goofing around with the guy assigned to take the picture, a Potosi investigator named Gary Reed. Soon Reed got caught up in the fun himself and was swapping one-liners with Darrell. The next day he returned with his camera and said, “We’d better take another photo. You’re laughing in the one we did yesterday. We don’t want people thinking we’re crazy.”

So Darrell put on his best poker face and Reed finally got the picture he was looking for.

J
ANUARY 27, 1999
, turned out to be not quite so firm an execution date after all.

On November 16, four days after issuing Darrell’s original death
warrant, the Missouri Supreme Court issued a new and amended warrant changing the date of execution from January 27 to February 10. There was no word of explanation or clarification—simply a new warrant stipulating a new death date. Issued about as ceremoniously as a notice for traffic court.

Okay, sure, Darrell said, with a slight frown of puzzlement, when the amended warrant was brought to his cell in protective custody. No big deal, he thought. So they’re monkeying around with the timing. So what? It’s not happening anyway.

Afterward, sitting on his bed, he decided it was time to get down to work. Forget the death writs: he knew he wouldn’t be executed. With God as his lawyer, a miracle was bound to happen. So why not begin spreading the news right now? It was a golden opportunity for testifying. Tell people on the outside what was in store for him before the walls started shaking. Tell them in advance so that when it happened, as it surely would, they’d recognize it for what it was.

The Faith preachers, he decided, should be first to know, big-time television evangelists such as Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, and others of their ilk. He’d write a letter alerting them that there was a miracle waiting in the wings. Any stage setting that might need doing, he’d leave up to them.

Darrell sent the letter on November 27, eight defiant pages riveted with biblical citations. He hit his punch lines right off the top.

“It just got better, Praise God! Lucifer’s own set a date to try to murder this child of God but they and their father are beat … [The execution date] forces this deal to a head and people shall see God show Himself strong on my behalf with one of His ‘suddenlys’ … Satan and his death penalty sons don’t have enough power, money, or people to murder me here or anywhere else! I am telling you before it happens so you will believe.”

The letter was sent to ten evangelists. If any of them actually got around to opening it, they could hardly be faulted for abandoning it halfway through. The letter showed Darrell at his resolute best, but also at his grinding, self-righteous worst. As testimony it fell dead
flat—there was no mention that Darrell himself may have done something wrong, not a whimpering word on the triple homicide. Regret? Remorse? Not here—not in this letter. It was all about Darrell’s grievances, Darrell’s pilgrim’s progress in a land of liars and hypocrites. All about Darrell the persecuted one, Darrell the target of evil forces in law enforcement and the courts.

But, still, there it was again: Darrell’s clenched-fist guarantee that somehow—miraculously—he’d be spared execution. With the death date less than two months off, he hadn’t wavered an inch. Whether out of monumental stubbornness, sheer delusion, or something else altogether, he was just as confident as ever. And now, with the letters sent, no one could say he hadn’t gone on record during countdown time.

D
ARRELL HAD NO
idea why his date of execution had been pushed back, and neither at first did most anyone else. After a while, however, you would’ve had to be almost willfully obtuse not to figure it out. In setting the date initially for January 27, 1999, the Missouri Supreme Court had committed a colossal blunder of timing. January 27 was precisely the date Pope John Paul II was scheduled to visit St. Louis. One of the most celebrated spiritual leaders of the age was coming to town, and the state supreme court had inexplicably set Darrell’s execution for the very same day.

Now what were the odds on this? Not just that the court could screw up so badly, but that the pope was coming to St. Louis in the first place? Not New York or Los Angeles, not Chicago or Washington, no, not any of the usual suspects, but St. Louis, poor old St. Louis, shrinking and bedraggled, the twenty-seventh city, a city whose best days were gone and mostly forgotten. Never before had a pope visited St. Louis. Never before, it would seem, had a pope even come close to visiting St. Louis. But now Pope John Paul II was coming, and St. Louis was the only city in the United States in his travel plans. It was a one-stop itinerary—St. Louis and nowhere
else. John Paul II, famously opposed to the death penalty, was visiting St. Louis on January 27, and the Missouri Supreme Court had chosen that precise date for Darrell’s execution.

It wasn’t as if the court hadn’t been given advance notice. St. Louis archbishop Justin Rigali had announced the papal visit in late April, and anticipation had been running high ever since. Everybody in Missouri knew the pope was coming, and everybody with any imagination knew the main reason for his coming was none other than Archbishop Rigali.

The Los Angeles–born Rigali had spent nearly a quarter of a century in the Vatican before being named archbishop of the St. Louis diocese in 1994. He’d worked closely with John Paul II during much of that stretch, accompanying the pope on his extensive travels and sometimes serving as his English-language translator. From 1985 until his departure for St. Louis, moreover, Rigali had served as president of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, overseeing the instruction of future Vatican diplomats in the delicate arts of international protocol. By most accounts, Rigali was an ideal man for the job, a master of Vatican-style protocol in his own right. The precise formulation, the deft pause, knowing exactly what should be said and, better, what should be left
unsaid
—Rigali had it down to a science.

Some observers found it odd that a man so perfectly suited to Rome, the consummate Vatican insider, should be transferred to the relatively unglamorous precincts of St. Louis. Rigali seemed to take it in stride, however, and in early 1998 he saw a chance for St. Louis to shine as never before. The pope was scheduled to visit Mexico City in January 1999 for a meeting with Catholic bishops from the Western Hemisphere. Since he was going to be over in this part of the world anyway, why not invite him to swing by St. Louis for an impromptu visit? He could fly directly from Mexico City on January 26, the day the bishops’ meeting was scheduled to wrap up, and then spend most of the following day in St. Louis before heading back to Rome. Rigali extended the invitation, and then, on April 23, 1998, the news hit the front page. The pope had said yes—
a gesture of respect and appreciation, undoubtedly, for an old and valued friend.

One can only imagine the sense of chagrin in both the court and the governor’s office when, four days after the first warrant was issued, the gaffe finally struck home. A once-in-a-lifetime papal visit to St. Louis, and they’d marked Darrell’s calendar for the very same day. If they’d deliberately been trying to insult the pope, they could hardly have done a better job. There seemed only one way out of the mess. Push back the execution. Finesse the date. Issue a new warrant setting the lethal injection for February 10. Let the pope have his visit on January 27 … see him safely off to Rome … allow a decent interval of time to pass … then execute Darrell. If everything went right, nobody would be the wiser.