...more about Howard...

Not very long thereafter, a very attentive State Trooper somewhere in Tennessee or Alabama made a routine traffic stop and noticed the young man and the license plate on the car fit the description on a warrant out of Arizona he had read just that morning. Badda-bing, badda-boom, the arrest was made, the victim’s wallet and ID were found in the car and she was identified, and Howard Smith was on his way, via extradition, back to Prescott, Arizona, to face murder charges.

The first time I saw Howard I remember just looking up. Way up. He actually stood six foot seven inches tall, and although he was very slender, he had shoulders as wide as a crossbow. He was sitting on the wooden bench just outside the booking area, handcuffed to the wall. He had a handsome young face, curly brown hair, large blue eyes, and the most bewildered expression I had ever seen. His blue eyes were darting around the booking area with a deer-in-the-headlights kind of terror.

The officer who had brought Howard in was telling our booking officer that Howard refused to do any of the required paperwork and that he was being uncooperative. In the confines of the legal system, to be uncooperative is just about the worst thing a person can do. It breeds annoyance with the arresting officers, with the jail staff and ultimately with the judge who has to do the initial hearing on the arrestee. A jail, like most of modern society, runs on paperwork: a form for this, a screen for that. It’s how we keep everything moving along and orderly. When someone neglects or refuses to do his paperwork, well, it’s like having a tire iron thrown into your bicycle spokes while you’re peddling along at twenty miles an hour. The bike comes to a crashing halt and there are always injuries in the process. In this case they could not proceed with the booking without Howard’s cooperation and paperwork, and it was destined to make the judge very testy.

I should have been afraid of Howard, I suppose, considering his immense size and the fact that the last woman to get near him ended up in the morgue with a broken neck. Somehow, however, I wasn’t. I remember sitting down next to him on the bench and having him move slightly away from me, like a rabbit trying to figure out the best escape route.

“Hello, Howard.” I greeted, “My name is Susan.” We usually never gave our first names to inmates, although I wasn’t completely sure why. I suppose it was due to the nature of the job and the need to keep things on a non-personal level. In my case it was always Deputy Quayle. But with Howard I had the unexplainable urge to use my given name. It didn’t seem to me that being professional was the best move at that moment.

Howard’s smooth brow wrinkled in a perplexed frown and he spoke in a very soft, surprisingly high voice, “Like the flower?” he asked.

I was puzzled, “Flower?”

“Black-Eyed Susans. They grow by the roads. I pick’em for my sister. Her name is…” Howard paused as if catching himself in the act of committing some sin. Then he shrugged, “Her name is Elaine, but she’s dead.”

Dead? I briefly wondered if sister Elaine had been his motel victim and then I recalled her name had been Lucy. My next thought was to wonder if Lucy had been his only victim? Had sister Elaine also succumbed to Howard’s enormous hands?

“I’m sorry she’s dead, Howard. What happened to her?”

Howard just shrugged again. He could not, or would not, remember. He also seemed to drift back into that deer-in-the-headlights stare, which I gathered might be his way of saying he had spoken enough on that subject.

“Howard, we need to do the paperwork for the judge. He needs that so that he can decide what to do with you,” I urged.

Howard huffed softly and shrugged, “He’s gonna kill me.” He stated.

“Kill you?” I know I sounded surprised, “Why do you think the judge is going to kill you?”
Howard’s eyes now brimmed with tears and he began to wring his enormous hands, “’Cause I killed her, that girl. She laughed and I grabbed her and she got quiet. They said I killed her, so now he’s gonna kill me.”

It was at that point I knew I was not dealing with a twenty-three year old man. I was dealing with about an eight or ten year old boy in a six-foot-seven-inch man-suit. He had refused to do the paperwork because he was unable to do it, not because he was trying to be problematic. I wondered why none of the officers who had been dealing with Howard so far had noticed his disability. Were they really that unobservant? It was pretty hard to miss. It was sort of like a third eye staring out at you from the middle of his forehead.

There are times when law enforcement personnel get so completely swept up in their duties or cases that they seem to drift into an alternate plane. Everything is suddenly about the case, the victim, the criminal, and the rest of the world begins to get a little fuzzy. This is necessary in order to keep these exhausted officers going, channeled into what they are working on, energized. But in the process the people involved, the victims and the perpetrators sort of take on a wax museum quality. They become a face, a name, a criminal act, and it gets hard for the officers and detectives to see the person instead of simply the facts. In Howard’s case they saw a giant young man who had strangled a young woman to death in a motel room and who was now being uncooperative. They did not notice the fact that he was still a young boy inside, or if they did notice it didn’t alter their mission, which was to solve and terminate the case.

That day on the booking bench was the first of what proved to be many chats I had with Howard Smith, however most of the information I found out about him came from other sources, such as psychiatrists, social workers and lawyers.

Howard was one half of a pair of fraternal twins. He had had a sister named Elaine who had died some years earlier due to a drug overdose. They were both made wards of the court and put into foster care at the age of ten when their father decided to be rid of his retarded son by throwing him out of a car that was traveling at 50 miles per hour. It was unclear as to where the twins’ mother was, or even if she was a part of the scenario. I don’t suppose it mattered.

After Elaine’s death Howard ran away and was in and out of treatment and juvenile hall for the next few years until he reached eighteen. Then he disappeared for awhile and there was no record of him until the fateful day he was hitchhiking along Highway 17, north of Phoenix, and was offered a ride by a young woman named Lucy. Friends of Lucy’s would later testify she had been having a bad week and just wanted to get away, so she borrowed a car, packed an overnight bag and said she was going to Flagstaff for a day or so. Apparently her parents had never warned her about picking up hitchhikers as mine had done. She saw a tall, good looking young man on the road and offered him a ride. Her bad week was immediately going to get much worse.

How they ended up in the motel was never really clear. Howard Smith had signed the register and put down the license numbers of Lucy’s borrowed car quite legibly. The detectives finally surmised that Howard and Lucy had stopped for the same reason any couple stops at a motel in the middle of the day: some Afternoon Delight. Then, during the foreplay, Lucy must have realized she was not romancing a fully-grown mind, even though his body and emotions were very much those of a twenty-three year old man. She either laughed at him, or made fun of him, or both, and like any eight or ten-year-old, Howard got mad. When a ten year old throws a tantrum it’s a pretty violent thing. When a ten-year-old in a six-foot-seven-inch body throws a tantrum it can be lethal, and Lucy found that out in the most unfortunate of ways.
After strangling her, Howard panicked. He took her wallet and the borrowed car and started driving until he ended up in Tennessee or Alabama or wherever the astute trooper pulled him over for a traffic violation and recognized him as the wanted murder suspect. The misadventure was suddenly over.

In all the years I worked in the jail, and with all the killers I have known and spoken with, no matter if their homicides were premeditated or accidental, Howard was the only one I ever felt was truly and genuinely sorry for what he had done. The tears he shed were real, the words of sorrow and fear he spoke were from the heart. He had a conscience and he knew what he had done was terrible and he would never have done such a thing if he had been thinking in a rational mind. Everyone agreed on that fact, even the lawyers and the judge. The fact of the matter, however, was that Howard could be lethal given the right conditions, and this was something no one felt could be ignored.

He never gave me one moment of unease, though. During the almost eighteen months he was in the jail awaiting trial he was very much a gentleman. The other inmates learned to not tease or threaten him because Howard would react like a ten-year-old and no one wanted to trade fisticuffs with him. On the other hand, Howard’s main aim in life was to please people, so he seldom was demanding or threatening and he became somewhat of a pet in the men’s dorm. Typically, any inmate who has a developmental disability like Howard’s quickly becomes a target for other inmates. They can be victims of theft or abuse of all sorts. But Howard was very much capable of fending for himself, even without the mental prowess to give him any edge. He had the size and the strength needed for any situation and the other guys soon decided it would be better to have him in their corner than in the opposition’s.

I became a sort of surrogate mom to him, I guess. I worked graveyard shifts for a good part of his incarceration and I used to bring him out of the cell in the wee morning hours and let him sit and talk with us, or sometimes he would sweep floors or scrub walls just for something to do. He also learned to read. He would never finish a copy of War and Peace but he was finally able to complete a simple form and read comic books, which was one of his proudest accomplishments.

Howard was finally sentenced to a term of twenty-five years in prison but his ultimate destination was to be the mental health block. I don’t think he was really all that unhappy about it. He knew he would have a place to live and would not be in danger anymore. He also felt he needed to be there, where he could never hurt anyone again. Before he left he told me he would write to me and tell me how he was and he made me promise I would write back to him. I would have done that, very happily, but I never heard from Howard again.

He would be about thirty-six years old now. I truly hope he has managed all right in prison and has gotten over the terrible guilt and remorse he felt at taking Lucy’s life. I have heard other inmates since, telling me their tales of murderous woe and how bad they felt at the act they had committed but it never really meant much to me. There has only been one man I’ve known who ever suffered true anguish over taking another’s life, and he was, perhaps, not capable of realizing what he was doing at that fateful moment. But it is said that all things happen for a reason and maybe that reason was so that I could get to know Howard.