The Death Class: A True Story About Life (18 page)

N
ORMA HAD KNOWN
Israel only a few weeks, but she knew enough to have a hunch that he needed to visit the prison. She’d read his essays, even if he had not wanted to share them aloud with the class. Norma had been visiting Northern State Prison with her students for the last five years. The men who spoke to her classes in the law library, like Carl, were part of a speaker’s forum handpicked by prison staff. To participate, the inmates had to show a track record of good behavior in prison, but their crimes were no less serious than those of any of the other men serving time in Northern State.

There was Donald Paul Weber, for example, who on December 18, 1977, at age
nineteen, had attempted to rape an eighty-year-old neighbor, then he slit her throat, killing her. At Northern State, Weber worked in the kitchen, learning computer skills, culinary arts, and Spanish, going to therapy, and taking part in group counseling and self-awareness programs, including one called “cage your rage,” in addition to the speaker’s forum. During one of Norma’s class field trips in 2007, Weber was one of the inmates who backed up a challenge put to Norma: why not teach a university-level class for the inmates? They did not have much more than vocational education and a GED program, but to learn from a professor with a PhD would be invaluable.

She mulled over the inmates’ request. As vicious as their crimes had been, the men at Northern State had given her students an invaluable experience, talking so openly about their lives semester after semester, teaching them about prison, crime, guilt, punishment, life, and death. She thought of her father’s life of crime. Some of these men could have been students in the Newark school system back when he was extorting from it for the mafia. This, she thought, could be her way to atone for her father’s wrongdoings. The least she could do was volunteer her time for a semester. Norma wrote up a proposal for the prison directors. She would teach one course—public health—that was it.

A dozen men ended up on her roster. She’d met most of them before on the field trips. As with her classes at Kean University, she had a waiting list. She did not ask for what crimes they were serving time. Unless they wanted to tell her, she did not feel the need to know.

Weber recruited other students and showed up for the first couple of classes. Then, to Norma’s shock and the rest of the community’s, he was let out of prison by the state parole board.

The idea of a man who had murdered a grandmother now suddenly free, and so familiar with her name and face, could have been enough to convince Norma to give up the volunteer teaching experiment and the prison field trips altogether. Paroled or not, some of the men had deeply evil streaks inside them. Some might never have been capable of reform, and who was she to think she could even begin to help them along that road? But even if no one else seemed worth coming back for, Carl did. He’d been locked up since 1990, with a projected
parole eligibility date of December 16, 2020, and he was known around Northern State as a poet, a mentor to younger inmates, and a devoted practitioner of Buddhism.

Somehow it seemed to Norma that amid all of this death and drear, he’d actually figured out a way to lead a decent life. Whenever her students met him, they came away feeling touched by him. “He just seems so at peace,” one student said in front of the class after returning from the prison. “And here I am still floundering.”

Norma decided that if she could be of service in Carl’s self-improvement endeavors, even in the slightest way, she would. And Carl appeared to look forward to Norma’s classes, pondering the lectures while in his bunk, holding study groups for exams in the library, looking up whatever information he could add to bolster her lessons, and writing thoughtful essays as homework assignments. In one, he told of the time before he’d been locked up when he’d taken a feral kitten home. He raised the animal, and it learned to trust and love him, often purring on his chest. One day Carl had been forced to relocate, so he put the cat, which he’d named Kitty-Kitty, in a pet carrier. But the move terrified her, and once he opened the box, she jumped out and ran away. Carl spent four hours with a flashlight in the woods, looking for her, but never saw her again.

“In the years since then, staring at the different prison ceilings above my head, this cat has helped put my own past into better perspective,” Carl wrote. “I mean, this animal ignored every instinct it had and learned to trust me. In the end, the trauma of having her world turned upside down by the very one she so trusted is probably what drove her to hysterics. My own life has many parallels with that.”

Not long after Norma read that essay, Carl stumbled across a gray, white, and orange stray calico cat that had wandered onto the prison grounds. It looked beat-up, with wounds and matted fur. Carl helped clean the cat and fed her scraps of kitchen food. He made a bed for her in a kitchen shed. But he worried that the guards would dispose of it if they found it.

The guards did discover the cat. Norma herself had a fondness for these furry creatures, maybe as a reaction to her father, who she
remembered once lit a cat’s tail on fire. She found out that a guard would be removing the cat at 3
P.M.
, where it would be taken to a pound. She assembled a “Kitty Rescue Team,” sending a student to the prison with a milk crate, who waited to intercept the cat on its journey. The student then transferred the cat to another student, who dropped the cat off with Norm, who took it to their home. Ever since then, around Norm and Norma’s house the animal came to be known as “Prison Kitty.”

What, she wondered, had happened in Carl’s past to lead him to this place? She did not have a hard time believing that the other men she’d met had committed horrendous crimes, no matter how much they denied it. But Carl? He could no longer even harm a cat.

Before she knew it, Norma had pitched an idea to teach a second class in prison: Community Mental Health.

And then a third: Death in Perspective.

She taught her prison classes with a scattering of stackable plastic chairs in a cramped room near the law library. A green banner ran across one wall, with the alphabet: “Aa Bb Cc Dd . . . ,” along with a poster of a surfer riding a wave and the word “Courage” and another of the R&B singer Brandy holding the Dr. Seuss book
The Cat in the Hat.
There was an old green school chalkboard, and two shelves held tattered paperbacks and hardcover novels with spines ripped off, with titles such as
Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War,
by Sebastian Faulks, and
Before You Sleep,
by Linn Ullmann.

In her classroom, everyone could speak comfortably because she taught inmates with the door closed—and a guard stationed on the outside. Since the men in this particular death class would not get to go on field trips, she would bring the field trips to them, inviting guest speakers, such as hospice and funeral workers, bringing in autopsy videos, and sneaking in copies of
Tuesdays with Morrie
donated by Kean University students. She would require the men to write their own eulogies and share them aloud.

As the inmates filed into the classroom, they knew Norma’s drill and always began scooting their chairs into a circle immediately. There was the tall man with gray dreadlocks and a long, droopy face who had been locked up since 1985 for kidnapping, rape, robbery, armed burglary,
and weapons possession. He usually greeted the professor with:
“Hola! Cómo estás?”
There was the wiry man with stringy gray hair who seemed fidgety, his eyes darting around, sitting with his knees and toes pointed inward, smiling like a little boy; he was serving his seventeenth year of a thirty-five-year sentence for rape. And there was a glazed-eyed middle-aged man serving a life sentence; he’d killed his mother and father with a hammer and a walking cane.

She had hoped that by attending Death in Perspective, some of the men would develop some victim reconciliation, some reflection on their own crimes. So far she didn’t know if it was working with most of the inmates, but her hunch about Carl had been enough for her to keep trying. He was no sociopath, she believed. Rather, she saw a man trying to hold on to his humanity in a place filled with violence, misery, and death. She felt the same defensiveness for Carl as she did for students like Israel. Carl helped her believe that redemption and forgiveness were possible. If he could do it in prison, she had no doubt Israel could do it on the outside.

Norma had traced Carl’s narrative from his class essays, discussions, and one-on-one conversations with him and his mother, a soft-spoken woman reliant on a walking cane, whom the professor chaperoned around one weekend when she came to visit her son as a birthday surprise.

From what the professor came to understand, his mother had raised seven children, Carl her third. He was so close in age to two of his sisters that he’d grown up practically a triplet—his mom had given birth to the three of them within twenty-three months. As a child he’d watched his father beat his mother and shove a gun into her mouth. Once his dad had shoved a loaded gun into Carl’s face and threatened to kill him. Carl had run away the next night. Within eight hours, he had been arrested for his first felony: burglary. He was eight.

He broke into schools and stole electronics. He broke into trucks and stole radios. He stole cars for joyrides.

One day his dad took off with the family to Florida. But Carl ran away his third day in the Sunshine State. During one of his truck stop
raids, he found a gun under a seat. He used it to rob a radio store and got caught. That time, a judge slapped him with charges for possession and use of a stolen firearm. Carl was twelve.

He was sent to a group home with a dozen other delinquent boys. He arrived on the day Elvis Presley died, August 16, 1977. All the boys crowded around a television with sullen faces as they watched memorials to the singer. A piss yellow bus came each day to pick up the boys and take them to school. But the supervisor was as drunk and abusive as Carl’s father, and within a year of his arrival the group home shut down and Carl was sent back home. But he was thirteen now and bulky enough to take on his dad—and anyone else, for that matter.

Carl’s dad was working in a plastics factory, running machines that shredded up and recycled old pieces. Once again, Carl went to work with him. One day, his dad, who was hovering right up close to the blades, gave the wrong signal to another worker, who turned on the machine too early. Three of his dad’s fingers were nearly severed. His dad drove to the hospital, maneuvering the car with his fingers hanging off at the bone. The doctor patched him up, but he couldn’t work for the next year. Before the accident, he’d been a drinker. Now he became an all-out drunk.

One day, Carl’s father ordered the kids outside, locking them out of the house and telling them not to try to come in for any reason. When his mother returned, the boys flocked to her, complaining. She wanted to know who had been in the house with Daddy. They said it was Carl’s fifteen-year-old sister. The sister confessed: their dad had been raping her. It had been going on for about two years. It turned out that he had raped his nonbiological daughter, Carl’s half sister, and molested Carl’s younger sister too. His mom called the cops. Carl’s dad was sent to prison.

But all of the events had worn Carl down. By fifteen, he had his own criminal charges chasing him through Florida. More robberies.

Carl decided to say good-bye to his mom and siblings. This time, he wouldn’t be coming back. He gathered up a small bag of his belongings and hitchhiked his way back to New Jersey.

Ten
years later, Carl found himself crumpled on a grimy floor of the Camden County Jail eight days before Christmas.

T
HE MAN
C
ARL
had confessed to killing was a thirty-five-year-old named Stephen with brown hair and a receding hairline, according to police reports. On the day he died, he was wearing dark corduroy trousers, a long-sleeved T-shirt, a green sweater, and orange swim trunks beneath.

A month after the man’s disappearance, Carl’s sister walked into the police station and fingered her brother and his twenty-two-year-old friend in Stephen’s death. Both men confessed in recorded interviews, explaining that they had known Stephen and discovered that he inherited about $12,000 and was keeping the money in the trunk of his 1982 black Chrysler, which he was living out of. They looked for him for a few days, planning to rob him, but they couldn’t track him down and soon gave up—until Stephen showed up at Carl’s sister’s house to watch a football game. Carl showed up later, along with his accomplice. His sister put the children to bed and fell asleep after midnight.

When she was asleep, as the twenty-five-year-old Carl confessed to police in recorded interviews, “I hit him once in, in the side of the head and his head bounced and then he lifted his head again, and I hit him a second time and his head dropped.” Carl said he dropped the heavy statue made of wood, which was from Jamaica, after its top broke off. He backed away. But the guy was still breathing. That was when Carl got the vacuum cord. “I tried to strangle him with it, but I couldn’t hold the cord, my hands kept slipping.”

He still had not stopped breathing. “I took the plastic bag and put it over his head to try and stop the bleeding,” Carl told police. Then he fastened the bag with gray duct tape. The men found about $200 in Stephen’s pockets. They searched the car trunk and found “magazines, clothes, shopping bags full of junk.” They found a drafting kit in a blue case, a tan suede jacket, a thermal sweatshirt, thermal underwear, stacks of flyers, a marijuana pipe, two bottles of cologne, a white plastic hairbrush. But no inheritance.

The
men folded Stephen’s body into the trunk in a fetal position using duct tape and wiped up the blood on the floor with an orange tablecloth.

After Carl’s confession, he led police and a German shepherd named Buffy to the spot where Stephen had been buried. About 1,250 feet into the woods, Buffy began to bark. They spotted the shallow grave, about three feet wide and three feet deep.