Death Letters

In 1990, Charles Dean Hood was convicted of murder and sentenced to die. Twelve years later he began writing to senior editor Michael Hall. Here, in three of his letters, he describes in extraordinary detail his two decades spent awaiting execution and reveals what it’s like to be taken to Huntsville for the lethal injection only to receive a stay at the last possible minute—not once, but twice.

September 2008

(Page 5 of 6)

Next thing I knew the room filled up with a lot of guards and people in free world clothing. I said, Cheryll, ‘Jesus’ is here to get me. All of a sudden, a calmness came over me. I looked up, expressed I love you Cheryll, tell Mom and Dad I love them, and don’t you worry okay. ‘Jesus’ is here. I felt the Lord in the room. I know without a doubt he was there. Mr. Lopez continued to stand in front of the cell and hold my hand. Got me some tea. I stood there, looked at Warden Simmons, and said, sir I appreciate you treating me like a human being. I let my record express what kinda inmate I was, sir. I wasn’t a trouble maker. And Major Smith was there. I thanked him for also treating me with dignity. And I started to express that “Jesus” was here, I knew it, and Mr. Lopez knew it too.41

Minutes went by, and the room continued to fill up. And the next thing I knew a gentleman came up to me and said, “I’ll be taking you back to Polunsky Unit in 30 minutes. Get ready.” I looked at him and said are you lying? He said, I don’t joke around like that. I looked at Mr. Lopez and we prayed and I fell to my knees, tears streaming down my face. I said thank you “God,” all glory goes to you. The room emptied out, and I was shaking so bad it was hard to hold the cup to drink the tea.42

Mr. Lopez said he was going over to see my brother. I thanked him and said I love you, sir. He left, and I was stripped out, cuffed again, leg irons placed back on. I was exhausted now. We walked out the door to get into the vans and I asked the officer if he got the tire fixed on the van. He laughed and said, you sure are worried about that tire. I didn’t say nothing else, but in my thoughts, yeah, I was worried, cause they drive fast, and if a tire blows we could all get hurt.

Loaded once again into the van, and I said prayer after prayer thanking “GOD.” We couldn’t leave until the death warrant expired. We started back, the hour drive just seemed like two hours. When we came within view of the big lights of the prison, I was glad to get back. After going through the back gate, we drove up to 12 Building, the door was open and Lt. Brown met us. I was totally exhausted. I asked, sir, if it is possible could you please just get me a reasonable mattress. I’m wore out, sir.

Lt. Brown said everything is already taken care of. I was taken in. After my property was placed in the cell, Officer Pope got me a tray. I ate the eggs and just fell out, went straight to sleep.

EDITORIAL NOTES

1 With Hood’s permission, his letters have been edited. Some of the grammar and spelling have been corrected for readability.

2 At Ellis, convicts were allowed to watch satellite TV in dayrooms or from their cells. Sets hung on the walls of the runs—or walkways—about every twenty feet. I asked Larry Fitzgerald, who was the public information officer for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) at the time, how they decided what to watch. “It was democracy in its purest form,” he told me. “They voted on it.”

3 A support staff inmate (SSI) is a well-behaved prisoner who earns the right to work in the prison laundry or as a janitor.

4 Donald Miller was executed February 27, 2007, for the robbery and murders of Michael Mozingo and Kenneth Whitt near Lake Houston in 1982.

5 Max Soffar, the only Jew on death row in Texas, was convicted of murdering three people—Arden Alane Felsher, Tommy Lee Temple, and Stephen Allen Sims—in a Houston bowling alley in 1981. His conviction was overturned in 2004 by the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but he was reconvicted in 2006. He remains on death row.

6 Hood did not remember Cosmos’s full name, only that he had been executed.

7 Fletcher Mann, known as Birdman, was executed June 1, 1995, for the 1980 murder of Christopher Bates in Dallas.

8 Farris was executed January 13, 1999, for the 1983 murder of Clark Rosenbaum Jr., a deputy sheriff in Fort Worth.

9 At Ellis, services for Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims were held in the rec room.

10 James Allridge, known as Slim, was executed August 26, 2004, for the 1985 murder of Brian Clenbennen in Fort Worth.

11 Willis was eventually freed in 2004 after a federal judge overturned the conviction. When I talked with Hood about Willis, he got tears in his eyes. “I cried like a baby when Mr. Willis left, because he was like a dad to me. What really hurt—I get a letter from him and he told me he didn’t want to write no more because he wanted to get this place out of his life.”

12 One of the ways death row inmates passed the time at Ellis was by “piddling,” or making crafts out of things bought at the commissary. With so much time on their hands, they often produced surprising artifacts. Kenneth McDuff, who murdered fourteen people and was executed in 1998, once made a clock out of tongue depressors.

13 Robert Alan Fratta was convicted in 1994 of hiring two men to kill his estranged wife, Farah, at her home in Atascocita. They were also convicted of capital murder. All three remain on death row, though last year, an appeals court ruled that Fratta should receive a new trial.

14 Marlin Enos Nelson, known to Hood as Chucky, was convicted of the 1987 murder of James Randle Howard in Houston. He remains on death row.

15 Larry Fitzgerald, the former public information officer, did not deny Hood’s allegations. “I don’t know about selling it,” he told me. “But there have been officers in the system disciplined for doing it.”

16 George McFarland was convicted of the 1991 robbery and murder of Kenneth Kwan in Houston. He remains on death row.

17 Paul Colella was convicted of the 1991 murders of Michael Lavesphere and David Ray Taylor on South Padre Island. In 2003 the capital murder charge was dropped. Colella pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and was given twenty years. He’ll be eligible for parole in 2012.

18 Bobby Lee Hines was convicted of the 1991 robbery and murder of Michelle Wendy Haupt in Dallas. He remains on death row.

19 Cartwright was executed May 19, 2005, for the robbery and murder of Nick Moraida in Corpus Christi in 1996.

20 On Thanksgiving Day 1998, seven death row convicts attempted a daring escape from the Ellis Unit. Only one, Martin Gurule, made it beyond the fence. He was found a week later about a mile from the prison, drowned in Harmon Creek, a tributary of the Trinity River. The cardboard and magazines he had strapped around him for protection from the razor wire had swelled with water and weighed him down. This was the first escape from Texas's death row since 1934, and the worldwide attention that followed was extremely embarrassing for the TDCJ. This, along with the fact that Ellis was overcrowded, led the state to move all inmates to the Terrell Unit, a modern prison opened in 1993.

21 Two days before Hood sent this letter, an appeal had been filed on his behalf. It contained an affidavit from Matthew Goeller, a former assistant district attorney who worked under Tom O’Connell (the prosecutor in Hood’s case), alleging that the affair between O’Connell and Judge Verla Sue Holland was “common knowledge” around the courthouse. Goeller was the first source who had worked for the prosecution to corroborate some of the claims in the 2005 Salon article, and his testimony brought a great deal of national media attention to Hood’s case.

22 The Terrell Unit had been named for Charles Terrell, a former chairman of the Texas Board of Criminal Justice. But in July 2001, Terrell, who was no longer on the board, asked that his name be taken off the prison. “I just don’t like my name being associated with death row,” he told the Dallas Morning News. Allan B. Polunsky, another former chairman, had no such qualms.

23 At Polunsky the cells are six feet by ten feet. The solid steel doors have two narrow vertical slits for observation and a drawerlike horizontal slot for food delivery. Unlike the cells at Ellis, which had bars for doors, these cells were specifically designed for solitary confinement.

24 From the start, it was clear things were going to be different at the new prison. Officials had concluded that Gurule and his mates had hatched their plan on the yard, in the cells, in the garment factory, and possibly during church services. So goodbye to all that.

25 When a recalcitrant or slow-moving inmate will not leave his cell, the guards use pepper spray to subdue and remove him. According to Larry Fitzgerald, before pepper spray became common, in the nineties, the guards used tear gas.

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