The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (29 page)

He was grateful for Michael’s description of a typical morning and now had follow-up questions: “I see you drink tea—I would assume hot tea—right? In Texas we drink our tea ‘iced tea.’ Yes, you’d raise some eyebrows if you asked for hot tea.”

He appreciated Michael’s bits of praise, including about his positivity. He didn’t want to mislead his friend, though: he assured him that he still had dark moments aplenty. He was just trying to get by, to stay focused: “I’m just trying to keep my mind from wandering—too much drama & chaos and petty issues to deal with … At times I actually believe this place does it deliberately to keep us un-balanced.” But enough of his dislikes, he said again and again in his letters to Michael. He wanted to be positive: it was another damned day of his caged existence, but he would find a way to hold his head up high!

He wasn’t proud of everything he’d done. He knew he was far from perfect and had made grave mistakes. And yet when Stroman spoke about his crime, which wasn’t often, at least not with Michael, he still tended to make up justifications. And he could flat-out lie to some of his new pen pals in a way that he could no longer to, say, Ilan Ziv. He told Michael that he did what he did to avenge the death in the Twin Towers of a sister. “Out of love, anger and stupidity,” he
wrote, “I lashed out at the Muslim world—and became what I hated the most—a terrorist.” He could still, for all his evolution, betray a macabre sense of self-importance about his actions: “My case is very high-profile since I’m the 1st man in AMERICAN HISTORY to retaliate after SEPTEMBER 11th 2001.”

He struggled with the feeling that at this stage of life he should be serving his progeny, and here he was locked away. Instead of guiding and protecting his children—and now even his lone grandchild—he was wasting his days, useless to all.

But he was determined not to stew in his own worry. Life was full of other people and more important things. A budding man of the world, Stroman claimed to be hooked on international news. He shared with Michael his concerns about the weather over there: he had heard it was Britain’s coldest winter in more than four hundred years. He mentioned learning of the tragic explosions at the Pike River Mine in New Zealand, which trapped and killed twenty-nine workers, and seemed to hear in their condition echoes of his own: “the feeling of being trapped … the feelings the loved ones must have … helplessness.” The geopolitical scene filled him with worry: “I fear what’s boiling up as we speak—China, Iran, North Korea, Russia—troubled times indeed.”

One story that especially troubled him was the news from Japan of an earthquake, a tsunami, and now a nuclear disaster. He had an idea to offer, though he figured that Michael was probably in no position to do anything about it. What if they let some Death Row prisoners like him go over there and into the contaminated zones, where they could work to contain the leakage? “Why be foolish and not send us to do the task at hand … willingly and with pride.”

T
HE NEWCOMERS IN
Stroman’s life could be a little too credulous. Having come into his life when they did, they could minimize his
darkness. Stroman’s sister Doris didn’t personally know most of these do-gooder types who had fallen in love with her brother, but she knew of them and got a good laugh thinking about them. She loved her brother, but she loved him with eyes wide open, knowing everything she knew, knowing what he was and what he’d never be. These people—Ilan Ziv, the pen pals, the blog readers—they seemed to her to be begging Mark to con them.

Ever since the trial, but before it, too, Doris and Mary had believed that Stroman would say anything to save himself. He wasn’t your regular criminal. He was a cunning one.

The sisters rattled off the misinformation they had heard in the news or from Mark’s lawyers or at the trial. Their mother couldn’t have had Mark at age fifteen, Doris said: “That means she would have had me at age nine.” Further: “There was one thing that I read, that his mother was found in a ditch pregnant. That’s not true.” They said it was the same thing with the sister in the World Trade Center: “There wasn’t one.” Doris denied that Wallace had hit them, although her exoneration contained a different accusation: “He never beat any of us. But I was sexually abused by him.” Mary denied that Wallace was a heavy drinker, though Doris remembered otherwise: “I remember he used to drink those tall ones.” Mark wasn’t the victim in school, Mary said: “My brother was not bullied. He bullied.” Nor, she said, had Mark run away to their grandparents eleven times—maybe once or twice. The sisters questioned whether Mark and Tena were ever legally married: “I’ve never seen a marriage license,” Mary said. She denied that Mark had inherited any of his racism from the family: “My stepfather was not a racist. Neither was my mother. Or me or my sister.” They dismissed claims she’d heard attributed to Mark that they had a pet monkey named Tarzan as children. Nor did they buy the 9/11 warrior thing: they just saw their brother as a screwed-up, possibly brain-damaged or bipolar guy with an untreated drug problem.

Though she accused him of many fibs, Mary was particularly
exercised about Mark’s self-depiction as a motorcycle man: “He claimed to ride, but he didn’t. He loved Harleys, but he never had a bike. I had a bike. He never had a bike.” She added, “I tell you, I think there was something wrong with my brother’s mind. I think he lied so much, he believed what he lied.”

She continued, “It was always hard with my brother, because he was such a good con man. He could tell you something and make you believe it. So it’s hard for me to believe anything that came out of his mouth, just because he always conned his way out of everything.”

Doris thought Mark had figured out what these kindly liberals helping him wanted to hear. She did believe, from what she gathered by letter and on occasional visits, that he was becoming a better man at Polunsky: “He was going back to the old Mark—the kindhearted Mark,” Doris said. What made her wary was how her brother had become a vessel for all his helpers’ ideas about the world. Perhaps they needed to believe Mark had changed in order to recoup a respectable return on their investment of time and feeling.

Doris was right that the people who had grown fond of Stroman saw him through their own lenses, tinted or smudged as they might be. They tended to fixate on the idea of his abusive childhood and awful parents. They seemed to see a man whose choices they judged to be less real than their own had been—a victimizer who, if you looked more closely, was a victim of his circumstances. They flirted, as his sisters resisted doing, with the idea that Stroman was not wholly his own problem—that his failure was also somehow ours.

To Doris and Mary, their brother was a remarkable shape-shifter who knew how to promote himself. He had become almost like a brand, with a small but fanatic cult of consumers. Doris realized this when she went online, on Facebook and elsewhere, and left comments trying to correct the record. She claims to have received a death threat over the phone not long thereafter—“All of you are gonna die,” the person said—as well as a great deal of backlash from other Internet surfers, who were defensive of Mark’s reputation.

Doris and Mary, of course, had their own biases. Some time ago, they had told Ilan Ziv a very different story than this one, portraying their childhood in considerably bleaker terms. They seemed cannier now, and determined to prevent any of Mark’s reputation from spilling on them. “I truly believe he’s a sick man,” Mary said, “and I’ll always believe that. And the system failed him.”

O
N JANUARY 20,
2011, Mark Stroman’s lawyer paid him a visit at Polunsky, bearing some long-awaited news. The system had decided that Stroman would die on July 13 of that year.

Less than a month later, Stroman received a letter from the state. He opened it during the recreation hour, and as he began to read the death warrant, which graciously added an extra week to his life, he couldn’t stop “laughing like a crazy man,” perhaps out of fear, perhaps at the absurdity of receiving a letter from your own government informing you that it plans to kill you:

It is hereby ordered that the defendant, Mark Anthony Stroman, who has been adjudged to be guilty of capital murder as charged in the indictment and whose punishment has been assessed by the verdict of the jury and judgment of the court at death, shall be kept in custody by the director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Institutional Division, until the 20th day of July, 2011, upon which day, at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Institutional Division, at some time after the hour of six o’clock p.m., in a room arranged for the purpose of execution, the said director, acting by and through the executioner designated by the director, as provided by law, is hereby commanded, ordered and directed to carry out this sentence of death by intravenous injection of a substance or substances in a lethal quantity sufficient to cause the death of the said Mark Anthony Stroman until the said Mark Anthony Stroman is Dead.

Ten days later, he was minding his business in his cell, typing a letter to his attorney, when two guards showed up at the door. They said Stroman was wanted at the major’s office. As he walked down the hallway, it felt different from before: he could see people talking but couldn’t hear them; the only sounds were the blood pulsing in his head and his own footsteps. Awaiting him in the office was a stack of papers: all the forms he had to fill out to get to the next round, so to speak. Everything around him seemed to echo; the world was swirling in slow motion. He returned to the cell with the packet of death. The men around him were unusually silent. No screaming, no barking, just some quiet acknowledgment: “I receive a few silent nods of the head, which we are all aware of in this place of death meaning ‘take care’ and good luck,” Stroman wrote. He packed up his things, had a last turn at recreation with his buddy Olsen, and then migrated to his new death watch cell, where they kept prisoners awaiting imminent execution under closer scrutiny. He felt like some kind of reality-TV star, with that camera staring at him from the wall. The unit had four death watch cells. When you were placed in one of them, you could safely assume two things: that someone else had just died, vacating a spot; and that you were going to die before long.

Stroman knew that everything that happened now might be for the last time. Earlier that month, for example, he had savored what he knew might be his last encounter with rain, and then written about it. Out he went with his friend Olsen to the rec cage. He had heard of an arctic blast aiming its wrath at Texas, but it was supposed to be in the sixties still, so the men wore shorts and T-shirts. A faint drizzle blessed them, and Stroman savored its smell. Then the drizzle exploded into a torrent. The temperature plunged, and it felt a lot like that arctic blast that was supposed to be far away still. The lights above them began to gyrate. The wind, which almost never came down into their high-walled cage, ducked and thrashed the men. It was the first time Stroman remembered feeling wind in
nine years. The rain blew in every direction. “We laugh like two little kids enjoying our morning time,” Stroman recalled. After twenty minutes or so, he and Olsen were numb, and the guard accompanied them back inside.

Stroman headed for the showers at once: “I undress and am instantly hit with the hot water and my whole body tingles. Almost a painful feeling; the coldness had numbed me just that quick. I showered and thawed at the same time.” It was enough excitement, Stroman concluded. He swore he wasn’t going to leave that cell for the rest of the day if he could help it: “No more movement for me unless I’m called out to get my death warrant or a visit arrives.”

“I
hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the armed forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”