Almost Midnight (42 page)

But then, about a year later, Darrell did something strikingly out of character. He actually backed down, relented—not all the way, but more so than at any point during his long imprisonment. While still refusing to take on the kitchen job, he indicated that he was now open to the idea of riding double, or sharing a cell. The privations of administrative segregation had finally proven too much even for him.

So these days, with the commutation several years behind him, Darrell is out of isolation, back in circulation, and making the best of doubling up. He’s now able to purchase snacks and writing materials from the canteen. He can take his exercise in the yard. He can mingle with other prisoners in recreation, or drop by the chapel or the law library. And, of course, he can see family and friends in the visiting center—contact visits now, a handshake or a hug; not the behind-the-glass, over-the-phone affairs that he was accustomed to for so long.

But there’s still the loneliness, and the endless waiting. Besides getting very few visitors, he misses the company of some of the death-row prisoners he’d gotten to know over the years. Bert Leroy Hunter, especially—Bert Leroy, Darrell’s best friend at Potosi, was
executed in June of 2000. Jeffrey Tokar, another good friend, followed almost two years later.

Jeffrey Tokar’s execution went off almost unnoticed, with barely a ripple of protest. It was the twenty-third lethal injection in Missouri since Darrell’s commutation. It seems so long ago now, the commutation, so terribly distant. Strange and distant, almost make-believe, a storybook episode from some lost and faded era. And yet, for the briefest of moments, it seemed to possess the power, the urgency, and, yes, the sheer capriciousness of revelation. It seemed that it might make all the difference in the world. If Darrell, why
not
everyone else? Why not indeed.

The moment was stalled by a hotly contested Senate race, in which the two principal candidates seemed determined to out-muscle one another on the death penalty. And then, on September 11, 2001, it was eclipsed altogether by an infinitely more powerful moment. In this moment of horror, and of shock, and of immense national grieving, there was neither time nor space for worrying about the fate of convicted killers on death rows across the country. The day for this, if it came at all, would have to wait.

As if this weren’t enough, the nation was soon treated to the sorry spectacle of a sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, with some of the country’s leading Catholic bishops facing accusations of having covered up for predatory priests under their watch. The Catholic bishops, as much as anyone, had been hopeful of building on the commutation. They hadn’t wanted it to end with Darrell. They’d been working and praying for the day when it might once again become front-page news, this time as the miracle in Missouri that helped put a stop altogether to the death penalty in the United States. Instead they themselves had become news, and in the process their moral voice was weakened and their credibility cheapened. How could the bishops be taken seriously as a voice of conscience in America, on capital punishment or any other issue, when they had proven singularly inept at keeping their own house clean?

So the commutation is rarely spoken about these days—by the
bishops or by anyone else. It’s long ago and mostly forgotten. For many of those who’d been hoping that its impact would extend far beyond Darrell, it now seems a wasted opportunity. It’s the miracle in Missouri that got sidetracked, dead-ended—the miracle that could have been so much more.

Darrell, of course, thinks differently. All things in God’s good time, he says. He’ll be busting out of prison soon enough, and then the commutation will really start to pay dividends. He’ll hit the streets preaching about the radical mercy of God and the fundamental evil of capital punishment. He’ll tell the whole world everything he’s learned since a retired bluegrass musician visited him in the Taney County jailhouse an eternity ago. People will initially think he’s crazy, they’ll try avoiding and ignoring him, but they’ll never succeed in shutting him down. Eventually they’ll find themselves listening, and also believing. After all, he’s one of the very few who have made it back from the brink. He’s a Lazarus of death row.

D
OWN IN SOUTHWEST
Missouri some things have changed quite a bit, others hardly at all. Cockfighting was outlawed by the state legislature in 1998, but it’ll take more than legislation to do away with a traditional Ozarks way of life. There’s still plenty of action to be found in open-air pits in the backwoods, and some of the world’s finest gamecocks are still bred on remote properties up in the hills. Methamphetamine remains a terrible plague in the region, in some respects worse than twenty years ago. Most of the pioneering meth producers are long gone, either dead or in prison, but a new generation is proving itself every bit as resourceful, and elusive. Recipes for cooking crank, once a prized secret, are now readily available on the Internet, and many of the younger criminals operate out of mobile labs—small running vehicles, usually—that are difficult to track down and almost impossible to stake out.

Tom Martin and Jack Merritt spend fewer hours tromping around the brush these days. Both men retired from the State
Highway Patrol several years back, and Jack made a successful run for sheriff of Greene County. One of his first moves in the new job, proving his soundness of judgment, was to bring Tom on board as chief deputy. Doug Loring and Carl Watson are retired also, and soaking up the good life on family farms near Willow Springs. Chip Mason is still living in the Branson area, where he heads up security for the Silver Dollar City theme park. All of these men, good and decent men, truly Missouri’s finest, were initially shocked by the governor’s decision to commute Darrell’s death sentence. They disagreed with the decision but they accepted it, made their peace with it, and moved on.

Others have moved on also. Mary Epps seems to have gotten a fresh start, living and working in southwest Missouri, and raising a young family. Joyce and Donna, Darrell’s ex-wives, are still haunted to some extent by their “Darrell years” (as he’s still haunted by his years with them), but they, too, appear to have put the worst behind them. Even Darrell’s children, most of them, seem in the process of laying the ghosts to rest and looking toward the future.

For others, however, it’s been more difficult. The commutation was especially rough on the Lawrence family, forcing them to pick through the ruins of the triple homicide—to exhume the horrifying memory of it, and the terrible sense of loss. They felt betrayed, not unreasonably, by the deal struck by the governor with the pope, and for some time afterward family members were exploring the possibility of some kind of legal recourse. Frankie, Willie, and Lloyd suffered brutal, pitiless death by Darrell’s hand. This is the harshest, most unalterable fact of the entire saga, a fact which nothing—not Lloyd’s own ruthless criminality, or Darrell’s conversion, or the pope’s intervention—can soften or excuse.

Some of the jurors in the case also felt betrayed by the deal. They’d answered the call to duty, these ordinary women and men, and they’d given it their solemn best. But then the governor, at the stroke of a pen, undid a decision they’d arrived at in fear and trembling. And why? they asked. Because he was overcome by his papal
moment? Blinded by the light? Law and justice certainly had nothing to do with it.

One of the jurors, a working-class man from Springfield, spoke of the commutation, and the emotional strain he and his peers experienced handing down the death sentence in the first place.

“The facts in the case were absolutely clear-cut,” he said. “Guilt or innocence was never a question. We knew that Darrell did it. What was really coldhearted was the grandson. He should have spared the grandson. So the decision to give the death sentence was easy. The struggle came with combating our reservations about actually going ahead with the decision. This has to do with our natural inclination toward mercy. It’s an inescapable part of our humanity. We’ve all done something we knew was wrong; we’ve all wanted a second chance. So now we were on the other side and we wanted to give Darrell a second chance. Most of us on the jury said, ‘Boy, we wish there was an alternative. We wish one of the attorneys had presented an element which gave us a reason to hold off.’ During deliberations in the penalty phase, just about all of us expressed this. But we weren’t given the opportunity to say no. The death sentence was our only option.

“I don’t fault the pope for asking that Darrell be pardoned. I fault the governor for doing it, and the reason he did it. He surrendered to the pope’s influence. He let his personal feelings dominate his decision-making. As jurors we knew we were supposed to address the law and not let our feelings enter into it. It causes me to lose some confidence in our system when things like this happen. I am just one small person who was asked to sit on a jury and make a decision on the basis of the law. It would be tough for me to sit on another one.”

The commutation was controversial everywhere in southwest Missouri, but nowhere more so than in Taney County. For some time afterward, the new county prosecutor, a dour man named Rodney Daniels, seemed intent on pursuing additional murder charges against Darrell. Darrell had been tried in 1990 on Willie’s murder only, not Frankie’s or Lloyd’s. So why not go after him now
on the other two killings and secure another conviction, another death sentence? See if the pope was up to bailing him out a second time? Jim Justus, an assistant prosecutor under Daniels at this point, told the press shortly after the commutation: “If my boss tells me to sic him, I’ll go get him.”

No new charges were filed, however, and as time passed the entire business was quietly retired. It may simply have been obligatory noise anyway, some tough talk to appease the local citizenry. The informal word around Forsyth was that county officials secretly dreaded the prospect of another trial featuring Darrell. Think of the glee the national press would take in it: here’s a guy saved by the pope, and these vengeful hicks are trying to nail him to the cross again. Imagine the carnival atmosphere: anti-death-penalty crusaders ringing the courthouse, waving placards, chanting, preening for the cameras; and inside some Johnny Cochrane wannabe grandstanding before the jury, gunning for fame and fortune. It would be little Taney County against the world; little Taney County turned into a laughingstock. And imagine, finally, the damage to the tourist trade, all that negative publicity. The best option was to leave Darrell aside, and save the county a lot of expense and embarrassment.

So the subject isn’t much talked about these days in the Forsyth-Branson area, at least in official circles. And the tourist trade shows few signs of slackening. U.S. 65, once a sleepy two-laner crossing the Arkansas line, is now a major thoroughfare bustling with out-of-state vehicles heading for the latest shows. On good nights the traffic on the Branson Strip is as thick as ever, visitors cruising from one end to the other and then back again, checking out the marquees, trying to decide between Andy Williams or Bobby Vinton, Mel Tillis or Mickey Gilley, or perhaps the Osmonds, the Duttons, or some other brighter-than-sunshine family act.

There are still places in southwest Missouri, however, where very few tourists dare to go. Darrell’s hometown of Reeds Spring is just twenty-two miles from Branson, a short jump up U.S. 65 and then a meandering run along U.S. 160 into Stone County. Less than
twenty-five miles away, and yet worlds removed from the comforting neon of Branson, the fancy theaters, the chain restaurants, the hillbilly theme parks. For most tourists Reeds Spring and the surrounding area remain uncharted territory—unfamiliar, secretive, bleak, and dangerous. It’s hard and uninviting country; somehow too authentic, too close to the truth. Less than twenty-five miles from the nostalgic make-believe of Branson, it’s a place where there are still real cockfighters, real outlaws, and real memories of things as they truly used to be.

The Eagle’s Roost, formerly Betty’s Tavern, sits nervously alongside Route 13 on the southern fringes of Reeds Spring. It’s a place with a past, more than its share of knifings and ugly brawls over the years, and at least one cold-blooded killing. Never mind tourists—the Roost is a place that even local law enforcement wants no part of. Most of the regulars remember Darrell, or at least they’ve heard stories, and one Saturday night not long ago a number of them sat at the bar with an outsider and voiced their opinions.

“I’m just telling you one thing,” a mangy, bleary-eyed guy said, “Darrell was a real good person. I used to run with Darrell. We’d go fishing and hunting. He was a good ole boy. He’d give you the shirt off his back. Something just went wrong with him. He snapped. He just did one bad thing. It was the drugs. Once he got in with the drugs, he changed. Also Vietnam—when he came back, he was never the same. Then when Lloyd Lawrence put out the contract, it drove Darrell crazy. It made him paranoid. I’ll tell you, it would have made anybody paranoid. Once the contract is out on you, it’s out there for good. The only thing you can do is to kill the guy who put it out on you. You’ve got to take him out first. Darrell had to do this. You would have done it, and so would I. The only bad thing Darrell did was killing Willie. He did this because he was so paranoid. But I’m telling you, Darrell was a really good guy.”

The barmaid, a buoyant, chain-smoking woman in her mid-thirties, delivered much the same assessment.

“I’ve only been living here in Stone County a few years but lots of people have talked to me about Darrell,” she said. “What was he
supposed to do? Go to the local cops and tell them Lloyd had a bounty on his head? The Stone County cops are as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. They’ve been getting kickbacks from the crank people for years. This is their main source of income. Everybody knows this. Darrell cracked under the pressure. I’m happy for what the pope did. Darrell didn’t deserve to die. I think this is a message from God.”

“Darrell did what he had to do and what nobody else had the guts to do,” a guy in a hunting jacket a couple of stools down chimed in. “Lloyd would put hits out on people, and you know how they’d respond? They’d run scared. I’ve heard that when he had the contract out on Darrell, he also had contracts out on two other local boys. J. D. Tolbert and Randy Gamble, I believe. J.D. and Randy didn’t come looking for Lloyd. Only Darrell had the guts for that. And once he made the move, he was locked in. He had to finish the job.”