David Dow - The Autobiography of an Execution

Nor did he challenge the state’s expert who single-handedly persuaded the jury to sentence Quaker to death. James Grigson is known as Dr. Death. He was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association as well as the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians, but that did not stop him from testifying in hundreds of trials. Grigson claimed to have examined somewhere between two hundred and four hundred capital-murder defendants—the number varied from case to case, because Grigson could not keep his answer straight from one trial to the next. But that did not stop juries from believing him. Sometimes he would not interview the defendants at all; other times he would visit with them for fifteen minutes or so in the county jail, asking them what they saw when they looked at ink blots. He would then sit on the witness stand for as much as five hours, telling jurors that the defendant before them would undoubtedly be dangerous in the future if not speedily put to death.

His flamboyant predictions were spectacularly wrong. By some estimates, he was wrong more than 95 percent of the time. But that too did not stop juries from believing him. Juries would even sentence people to death who had not committed any crime. In one famous case, Grigson testified that Randall Dale Adams would commit more violence if not executed. Adams had been convicted of murdering a state trooper outside of Dallas. Errol Morris made a documentary about the debacle of the trial. As it happened, Adams did not actually kill the officer; someone else did. Adams was released from prison after his innocence was established. He had not committed any crimes prior to his wrongful conviction, and he has not committed any since. But Grigson was nothing if not charming. His avuncular demeanor and white lab coat endeared him to juries. They did what he asked them to. He told them that Henry Quaker would be dangerous if they did not send him to the execution chamber, and the jury obliged.

When it was time for Quaker’s trial lawyer to cross-examine the doctor, perhaps to ask him about the inconsistency in his numbers, or his expulsion from professional societies, or the many cases where his prognostications had proven so unsound, Jack Gatling stood up at the defense table and said, I have no questions for this witness. Gatling had been so convinced he would win an acquittal that he had not prepared even for the single witness that even he could have discredited.

Quaker had a spotless prison record. Part of our narrative would emphasize that Grigson had also been wrong in his case, and testimony from Nicole and other guards would help us there. But the problem we had was that this first theme in the narrative ultimately pivoted on the fact that Quaker’s trial lawyer had been so inept, and even though he had been, it was too late for us to raise that claim. Some people think that law is about truth. It isn’t, exactly. It is about timing. The time to prove that Henry Quaker did not kill anyone was years ago, at his trial, not now, a week and a half ahead of his scheduled execution.

But we also had a second strand to our narrative. We could identify the murderer. His name was Ruben Cantu, and the proof that Cantu did it was the sworn words of Ezekiel Green.

Kassie said, It sure would be nice to know why Wyatt interviewed Cantu.

I said, I agree. Why don’t you ask him?

Kassie said, Me? I’ve never met the guy. What makes you think he’ll talk to me?

I said, Melissa Harmon told me that he got divorced six months ago, that he drinks every night at El Tiempo, and that he’s a skirt hound. I’ll pay for dinner if you get him to talk.

Gary said, You buying dinner for all of us?

I said, If she gets something useful from Wyatt, sure, why not.

Gary said, Hey Kass, be sure to wear something nice.

I said, That’s my line, man.

Kassie said, Yeah, and it’s just as clever, no matter who says it.

THE NEXT NIGHT, we were all sitting at El Tiempo, with a platter of mariscos a la parilla and beef fajitas. The amount this dinner was costing me was out of proportion to how hard Kassie had to work. She told Wyatt who she was and what she wanted to know, and he bought her a drink and told her. The neighbor who had seen the strange pickup truck parked in the street had remembered the last three numbers of the license plate. Wyatt did a computer search and came up with Cantu. He had arrested Cantu before for drug possession and decided he was worth talking to. Kassie asked why he hadn’t arrested him, and Wyatt told her because he had no physical evidence, because Cantu had no motive, and because there was no evidence that Cantu even knew Dorris Quaker or her kids.

I asked Kassie whether she had asked him about the gun they found on the floor next to Dorris. She said, I’m not a moron.

And?

He looked right at me and said that he had no earthly idea what I was talking about.

Now I do not mean any disrespect by this, but police officers are some of the best liars in the world. Their philosophy seems to be, so far as I can tell, that they are the good guys fighting the forces of death and darkness, and that entitles them to break the rules when they think they need to and lie about it later when they deem it necessary. Wyatt would have sworn a lie on his dead mother’s grave if he thought it would help him convict someone he was certain was guilty. If I knew anything, I knew that. But knowing means nothing. Proof is what matters, and I had no proof, and no prospects of getting any. Wyatt was not going to bare his soul, not to Kassie and certainly not to me, and every second I spent fantasizing that he would was another second I might as well have spent in prayer, for all the good it was going to do Quaker.

She said, He seems like a nice guy. He played football at LSU.

I said, Started dumb, finished dumb, too.

Jerome said, I know that one. It’s Randy Newman, sort of.

When people start to get your references, it can be because you have become obvious and transparent. It can also be because they are learning.

That night at home I put on a Tony Bennett–Bill Evans CD and carried a snifter of cognac out to the patio. Bennett was singing My Foolish Heart and I was thinking about lines. Wyatt didn’t care that he was lying and probably didn’t even acknowledge that he was lying, because in the world where he lived, Quaker was guilty of a triple murder, and any facts that got in the way of that conclusion weren’t facts at all. He used one set of concepts to make sense of the world. I use another. Why is that? I wondered. Why do some people care about ends and others care about means?

Last August we sat on the beach and watched the Perseid meteor shower. Hundreds of them fired across the sky. Lincoln kept saying, Look, there goes another one. I explained to him that we see them because the earth itself moves through the Perseid cloud. He said, It reminds me of dodgeball, Dada. It’s lucky they don’t hit us.

I looked up and found Orion. The hunter. I was just drunk enough to feel insightful, and the sky felt ominous. Our case hinged on a murderer we couldn’t locate who had been identified by a murderer who was dead. Quaker was in big trouble. A part of me hoped he did it. A big part.

AWEEK BEFORE the hearing we got the results of the blood testing. The drops leading from Dorris’s body to the spot where the kids were killed all belonged to Dorris. So unless she shot herself, went into the other room, murdered her two children, then walked back to the sofa, lay down, and died, she too had been murdered. It would be a lie to try to save Henry by pointing the finger at his wife.