A Courageous Fool: Marie Deans and Her Struggle against the Death Penalty
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A Courageous Fool: Marie Deans and Her Struggle against the Death Penalty
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Overview
Marie found herself fighting to bring justice to the legal process and to bring humanity not only to prisoners on death row but to the guards and wardens as well. During Marie's time as a death penalty opponent in South Carolina and Virginia, she experienced the highs of helping exonerate the innocent and the lows of standing death watch in the death house with thirty-four condemned men.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826503992 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Vanderbilt University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Todd C. Peppers, Fowler Professor of Public Affairs at Roanoke College and Visiting Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University, is co-author of Anatomy of an Execution: The Life and Death of Douglas Christopher Thomas.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Murder of Penny Deans
Every time I am about to meet a man, woman, or child on death row for the first time, I am thrown back into Penny's murder ... I identify so strongly with the victims and their families that I spend days calling on God to help me remember that the man or woman that I am about to meet is my brother or sister.
— Marie Deans, date unknown
When Marie gave a public speech about the death penalty, she would often tell the story of the murder of her mother-in-law, Evelyn "Penny" Deans. The story of Penny's brutal slaying represented why Marie got involved in death penalty work. It also highlighted why Marie thought that the death penalty was ineffective and morally offensive. "My mother-in-law's killing was the crucial element, the key that motivated me to get into this work ... I don't want to see anyone ignored or thrown away by society, whether they're the victims or the murderers."
When Marie sat down to outline her book, she decided to start it with Penny's murder because it was "the key" to her work. We want to honor Marie's wishes by presenting Penny's story early in this book, but it is necessary to place the story in context. By the time of Penny's death in 1972, Marie was living with her third husband, Bob Deans, in Charleston, South Carolina. Marie's first two marriages ended in divorce. Marie had a tense relationship with her parents, but she quickly bonded with her new in-laws, Joseph Robert "Jabo" Deans and Penny. Marie finally had parental figures that loved and supported her. Marie remained a constant presence by Jabo's side during his slow death from cancer in 1971.
I'd always adored Jabo, but we'd become even closer during his two years in the hospital. I'd visited him every day after my older son left for school, taking him the collard greens, cornbread, pork roast, fried chicken, and other Southern dishes he wanted. We talked about everything from the latest Charleston gossip, to my writing, to his days as a jazz drummer, to what it was like growing up — or, in my case, spending my summers — on a Carolina tobacco farm.
Marie's relationship with Penny grew even stronger when Marie announced she was pregnant. "I had a mother now and she would love me all her life," wrote Marie. "Her love had been a precious and desperately needed gift."
On the evening of August 20, 1972, Marie received a telephone call that changed the course of her life.
We were lying in bed watching the news when the phone rang. Our digital alarm clock had just clicked to 11:22 p.m. We let it ring several times before Bob leaned over and picked it up. His voice quickly changed from irritation to alarm. "It's Bill. Someone broke into Mama's house. She's been shot." If the police had called, Bob would have told them they'd made a mistake. Penny and her six-year-old daughter, Rachel [not her real name], weren't expected home for several days. But there was no mistake, and to this day, the phone ringing late at night is like a tripwire setting off an explosion of adrenalin in me.
We lived around the corner and got to Penny's house in minutes, but police officers, reporters, TV crews, and neighbors already formed a small crowd outside of the house. Bill ran to meet us. He looked like a little boy calling out to his parents in the middle of a nightmare. He grabbed me and held on tightly until Bob put his arm around him. Bill turned to Bob, and the brothers came together. I had never seen them so close and so tender with one another. Finally, Bob asked, "Where's Mama?" and Bill pointed to the house.
"Wait, don't go in there." The urgency in Bill's voice stopped us. "It's a crime scene. They won't let you in there."
Bob made a "so what" sound, and we kept moving until Bill grabbed my shoulder. "No, Marie! You cannot go in there." He looked directly at my protruding belly, then at Bob.
Bob put his arm around my shoulder and started walking away from the house. I pulled against his arm. "Wait, Bob, don't. She can't be left alone. We shouldn't be out here. They don't understand. She can't be left alone."
"She's not alone," Bill said. "The paramedics are with her."
Bob suddenly whirled around to face him. "Rachel! Where is Rachel?"
Bill put his hand out as if to stop Bob. "It's okay. She's okay." He told us that he had gotten Rachel out of the house and taken her to a neighbor's before the police came.
"So Penny knows she's all right?" I asked him. Bill walked away. "Bill?" He kept on walking.
I looked at Bob, and he shook his head. "He didn't hear you. He's just more hyper than usual."
Bill lived down the street from Penny in one of the smaller homes closer to the entrance of the subdivision. He told us that he and a friend had been driving by and saw lights on in the house and a strange car in the driveway. Knowing Penny and Rachel were supposed to be in North Carolina, they stopped to investigate.
As they came up the walk, they heard voices. Bill's first thought was that Penny was back and with some friend or neighbor. As he turned to go back to the car, he heard shots. He immediately went back to the door and started banging and kicking on it, trying to get in. His friend ran around to the back of the house and saw a man sprinting from the garage.
We stood just off the wide front lawn, leaning against a police car, watching the front door. The blue lights on the police cars kept searching the neighborhood in hypnotic silvery sweeps. It should have sounded like a helicopter in a Vietnam War report. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp. Instead, there was only the squawking of the police radio.
Each time the light illuminated the front of the house, I expected Penny to be standing there, throwing open the door. "Come on in. Why are you standing out there?" It was not real to be standing here. This had to be a play, a nightmare, anything but the reality that this was Penny's house and she'd been shot. Why would anyone hurt Penny? She'd been through enough watching her husband Jabo slowly die of cancer just a year ago, feeling her life fall out from under her, feeling so afraid, and then this baby. I caressed my belly. Everything had changed for her. She was so excited about being a grandmother.
Bodies blurred past us, moving between us and the door. I craned my neck to see around them. I didn't want to miss her. Bill was pacing off to the side, now and then pacing over to us and stopping for a minute. Bob was still, quiet.
A young police officer, his uniform black in the night, came over and put his hand gently on my shoulder. "Don't worry. We'll catch the bastard and fry him."
"What?" I could see the concern in his eyes, feel the gentleness of his touch. Imust not have understood what he said. What I heard did not go with those eyes, that touch. Suddenly Bill was there, reaching out for the officer and practically dragging him away from us.
"What is he talking about?" Bob asked. "Come up and say something like that to you. What is wrong with him?"
He had said what I heard. Did he really think the idea of "frying" someone was supposed to make me feel better? Nothing made any sense. I want to scream until someone told me why anyone would hurt Penny. I felt my body would fly into pieces if someone didn't tell me that Penny knew Rachel was all right. Was Penny hurting? Was she scared? Were her questions being answered? But all these people were running back and forth in front of us.
We were there for over an hour before we realized Terry, Penny's older daughter, knew nothing of what was happening. Bill insisted he would stay at the house, and I should go with Bob to get Terry. Bob called Terry's fiancé, P. A., and we picked him up on the way to Terry's apartment. She lived on James Island. We had to cross the Cooper River Bridge, the peninsula of Charleston and the Ashley River Bridge. It was Sunday night/early Monday morning. The Cooper River flashed silver streaks, but the marsh was dark and still. The streets of the city empty, the houses dark and shuttered.
Groggy and rumpled, Terry suddenly came awake when she saw the three of us standing outside. "What is it? What's happened?" P. A. put his arms around her. We couldn't see her. We only could hear first her gasp and then her crying and asking questions none of us could answer.
Coming back there was a blockade at the foot of the Cooper River Bridge. The policeman came over, shined his flashlight into the car, and started explaining that they were stopping all cars because they were trying to catch a man who had. ... "We know," Bob said, "We are Mrs. Deans's children. We went to get my sister." The policeman was so flustered, he couldn't stop talking or waving his flashlight around inside the car. We waited while he told us he was sorry, but we shouldn't worry, they would find the man.
And then an ambulance coming off the bridge into town passed us. No warning light. For a moment, we debated following the ambulance. Then someone said maybe it's not her, and we followed the policeman's hands pointing up the bridge.
When we got back to the house, Bob confronted the police. Had Penny been in the ambulance we passed? Yes, they told him. They had sent her body to the hospital for an autopsy. That's how we learned Penny was dead. Somehow we could not or would not take that in. Bob insisted to the police officer that his brother had not told him his mother was dead, as if that was the deciding factor between her being alive or dead. Bill came up and pulled us away. "How could you not know? How could you not understand? There was blood everywhere. I had to step over her body to get Rachel."
Strangely, that memory, which was not even ours, became my most enduring memory of that night, along with another — which we also never saw — the terroron Penny's face when she realized what was about to happen to her and might happen to Rachel.
I wasn't angry that night. The only feeling I had was an overwhelming sense of loss and sadness. Penny had been so lost after Jabo died. She and Jabo had married young, and she could not imagine — and was fearful of — life without him. The baby I carried had been a miracle for her. For the first time since Jabo died, Penny had begun looking forward. You could see life welling up in her. She was so excited about being a grandmother that she couldn't contain herself. She had to go to North Carolina and tell each member of Jabo's family in person.
Why was her life taken now? Why are we so good at passing on violence and so poor at passing on love? The question mourned in me, becoming a mantra that kept me from wailing or crumpling to the ground. Why? Why? God, how I needed an answer.
I don't know how long we stood outside the house before the neighbor directly across the street came and got us. At her house, we sat bunched up on the hall stairs staring out of her open front door, facing Penny's front door. Why did we stay there watching? Now we knew she was dead. We knew even her body was no longer there, knew she would never throw open that door and beckon us in. Yet we stayed, watching, waiting. We knew, but we still could not or would not take it in. Maybe we believed if we left, we would make it true, and Penny would really be dead. But if we stayed, kept the watch, somehow that night would go away, and we, too, would start the morning with a new beginning of our routine lives. Maybe our bodies simply had forgotten how to move.
As the sky began turning light grey, we watched the police seal the house, watched the yellow tape go up, watched them collect up their equipment and pair off into their cars, watched as one turned around and looked at us, watched him walk toward us. "Go home now. There's nothing more you can do here. Go home." We needed someone to tell us what to do, yet his was the command we didn't want. We couldn't change anything.
Terry pushed her head against mine. I put my arm around her and kissed her hair. Slowly she stood up and pulled me up. She, P. A., Bob, and I went to our house, and Bill went to the neighbors who were caring for Rachel.
Bob went straight to our bedroom and shut the door. Terry clung to P. A. on the sofa. I sat alone in a chair facing them, listening to Terry's questions. Why had this happened? Why was her mother dead? What had any of us done to deserve all we had been going through this past year? Terry's face, her fear and outrage, made me feel even more helpless. She was just a girl, and I wanted so badly to give her some answer, something to help her, but all I had were more questions.
Later in the afternoon Bob emerged from the bedroom to take Terry and P. A. home, telling me to get some sleep. As they left, Bob picked up the evening paper from the stoop and handed it to me. I watched them drive off before glancing down at the paper.
Penny's murder was on the front page. I stared at it, slowly beginning torealize we were in the middle of a "sensational murder case." I dropped the paper on the hall table and headed for the bedroom, but I couldn't sleep. I couldn't even stay in bed. My mind was like Bill's pacing.
I got the paper and spread it on the kitchen table. At first it just wasn't real. I'd begin to read it, then get up and stare out the window, start reading it again, then roam the house for a few minutes. Finally, I forced myself to read the entire article.
The story stirred the first feelings of complicity in me. It posed numerous questions, like why had Penny cut short her vacation? Where and under what circumstances had she met up with the killer? How had he gotten into the house? There were interviews with neighbors who expressed intense fear when they heard the killer was on the loose. Many had left their homes and gone into Charleston to stay with friends and relatives. To me, the story said Penny was somehow responsible for bringing this violence into her life and the lives of her neighbors.
The man who killed Penny had escaped from prison in Maine, killed another woman up there, taken her car, and headed South. It was her car in Penny's driveway. The assumption was that he had seen Penny on the road and followed her. The police, who had told us virtually nothing, had given many details to the reporters. Now I read about the fight Penny had put up, that her fingernails had been torn and broken, where the bullets had entered her head, exactly where and in what position she had been found.
I saw the expression on Penny's face when she realized what was about to happen. I could feel her terror as if the gun was pointed at me. No one should die alone like that, terrified like that. No mother should have to imagine, even for a second, such a death for her child. I wanted desperately to have been with her.
Who would do such a thing? Penny was friendly, outgoing. She always expected the best from people. Had the man seen Penny on the road in her big new station wagon and decided she must have money he could steal? Had she smiled at him at a gas station or in a restaurant, and had he decided she would provide a haven for him? Was he some sick monster who got a thrill from preying on vulnerable women? If he escaped from prison, how had he gotten a gun? Why target Penny? Of all the people who must have been driving South that night, all the people this man could have followed, in God's name, why Penny?
Soon our phone began ringing. Neighbors and friends from Mt. Pleasant and Charleston came with food and offers of help. We learned that one neighbor had made rounds of our house during those early morning hours to be sure we were safe. And much later we learned he may have had good reason, because the gun used to kill Penny was found in one of the yards abutting our back yard.
Within a day or two, the sheriff came to tell us the man who murdered Penny had been caught. Wayne Northup had run all the way to Fayetteville, North Carolina, with Penny's blood on him. He'd gone to his sister's, and she had turned him in. The sheriff said the man's sister had expressed her deepest sympathy for us, her sorrow at our loss and the loss of the family in Maine. The sheriff wouldn't give us her name, just as he wouldn't give her any information about us, but he told us she seemed devastated, and he believed she was sincere.
I had been like most people, not really thinking about the families of murderers, but the message from this man's sister haunted me. Before long I began trying to walk in her shoes, feeling what it must be like to have a brother or son or husband commit murder.
Since then, every time I go to or near Fayetteville I wonder if I am close to her, if I could find her, if she is all right. I wonder if she knows that, because of her, the organization of murder victims' families I founded several years after Penny's death includes the families of those the state executes.
In the next days and weeks, we tried to ignore the murder case and the sensational news coverage and to deal with our family and our grief. Terry had gotten into a spat with Penny before she left for North Carolina and felt incredible anger at the killer for cutting off any opportunity to mend that temporary rift. I tried to assure Terry that she and her mother were fine, but the only real relief for her came when an aunt told us that the reason Penny had come home early was because she missed us.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Courageous Fool"
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Table of Contents
Foreword Joe Giarratano ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1 The Murder of Penny Deans 9
2 The Birth of an Abolitionist 21
3 Marie and the Men of the South Carolina Death Row 46
4 Transitions 70
5 The Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons 80
6 Marie and Russ 111
7 Inside the Vortex of Evil 129
8 Standing Watch in the Death House 143
9 Marie and Joe 162
10 The Fight to Save Joe Giarratano 186
11 The Death of the Coalition 207
12 The Final Years Alone 234
Afterword Joseph Ingle 245
Timeline of Major Events 249
The Men of the Row 251
Previously Unpublished Writings of Marie Deans
The Runaway 253
The Gift 261
Notes 269
Index 281