"Chappy"

As I mentioned earlier, God lives in the Yavapai County jail. It’s a very good possibility that He has a myriad of clones that live in jails and prisons all over the world, or perhaps He truly does have the ability to be everywhere at all times. I don’t know for sure, but I do know that no matter how evil and black a person’s deeds may have been to land him or her in jail, they all seem to find God and repent while they are incarcerated.

After working as a detention officer, I then spent five of my years in the jail as an inmate counselor, which gave me a lot of insight into inmate behavior and thought patterns, but I would venture to say it did not hold a candle to the stories and tales Chappy heard. Being a jail or prison Chaplain certainly takes a special kind of person. He or she must be not only kind and forgiving; they must also have the ability to know when they are being manipulated and flimflammed. In Chappy’s case, I would say he was the most streetwise Catholic I have ever known.

Chappy was a rather diminutive man; just slightly round, with a graying beard and merry hazel eyes. He might have resembled Santa Claus if his beard had been longer and he had worn a red flannel hat to cover his balding pate. You rarely saw him without a smile on his face and a good word on his lips.

I don’t know how long Chappy had been Chaplain there in the jail but it was a good while before I came to work there. He was a Deacon in the local Catholic Church and had retired from a secular life working in electronics. Chappy was a very bright guy. I don’t know if he learned his street knowledge from the jail surroundings or if he had had it before he started there. Maybe it was just natural to him.

His favorite activity was in the field of Religious Bullshit. If an inmate came into jail claiming he was a member of The Church Of The Divine Pomegranate and had to have pomegranate wine at every meal, Chappy would take it upon himself to investigate this claim and locate any and all information available regarding The Church Of The Divine Pomegranate. If the inmate’s claim was factual, Chappy would go out of his way to be sure the religious rules be followed, but if not, well, Chappy could be really amusing.

The most common religious claim was that of Judaism and the refusal of the inmate to eat pork. Chappy had very little trouble verifying these claims. He would ask for the inmate’s Rabbi’s name and the temple where he attended. If this information was unknown by the inmate, Chappy could be pretty sure the guy was not a practicing Jew.

If an inmate was a Seventh Day Adventist, and Chappy could verify this, he would see that the inmate got his pastoral visit on Saturday. A true Islamic would be allowed a copy of the Quaran; a Mormon would be allowed a copy of the Book of Mormon. Chappy looked at this as not only the inmate’s Rights, but also the humane thing to do. He was extremely fair and also very patient, but even Chappy had his point of no return.

It all came about when the local police booked a transient named Hobie into the jail for lewd conduct, public consumption and criminal trespassing. It is said that alcohol magnifies a person’s true personality, so if that person is a jerk to begin with, the use of alcohol will turn him into a Super Jerk. That’s pretty much what occurred in Hobie’s case. He came in spitting and cursing and threatening the world, which leads me to pause here and wonder why so many inmates spit? They use it as sort of a means of attack and communication. It’s very common. So common, in fact, that the jail has a supply of “spit masks”, which are mesh hoods that are placed over an inmate’s head so he or she cannot assault every passerby with a glob of spit. Hobie was fitted almost immediately with a spit mask, but not before he managed to get the booking Sergeant and an officer and a nurse.

Fortunately, I was out of range that day and, as I look back, I cannot recall ever being the recipient of a spit attack. I consider myself lucky, and also very agile, which is why I haven’t yet been hit. I suppose the spitting comes from frustration, being the only weapon a handcuffed person has at his or her disposal. Women spit as much as men do, in fact I might wager they are more apt to spit at an officer than their male counterparts. They are also much nastier drunks than men.

Hobie was just not a very nice guy to begin with. His public consumption of Ripple had accentuated his nasty demeanor to the level of Disgusting and he was sharing that with anyone and everyone in sight. He was too difficult when he came in to attempt to print and book him, so, as is protocol in the jail, Hobie was taken upstairs to a holding cell to wait until he sobered up or exhausted himself with his behavior. Once safely secured in the cell, he could yell and spit and carry on to his heart’s content and still not reach anyone physically. There was a small window in the door of the cell, with metal mesh and a hard plastic flap that could be lowered to keep fluids from being propelled across the room.

Chappy was on duty that day and had been observing Hobie’s behavior and the process at hand with his customary quiet interest. He did not generally get involved in such scenarios because he knew very well that there was no use counseling with a drunk. Chappy generally handled more of the social services end of things and offered religious counseling when it was requested. He didn’t enjoy inmates like Hobie any more than the rest of us did and he had a heart that did not ever bleed for them. But he had his clerical collar on that day and happened to have some work to do at the computer just across from the holding cell where Hobie was being housed. It took about ten seconds for Hobie to recognize him as a Chaplain, even in Hobie’s drunken haze, and that was when the tirade began.

“Gimme a Bible an’ I’ll show you all about how I’m being imprisoned for God!” Hobie proclaimed.

Chappy made the fatal error of glancing up.

“It says so! Right there in…in Revelations! It says the innocent are gonna be imprisoned for God!” Hobie continued, now pounding his fist against the metal mesh in the window. “Are you gonna let them imprison me? I got work to do for God!”

Religious ideations are extremely common among the mentally ill and drunks. Don’t ask me why, it’s just a fact. Chappy was used to it and there wasn’t much he had not already heard. Some of them knew their Bibles very well; most knew bits and pieces, like Hobie, and put them together into rambling accounts to suit the occasion. If Hobie had been sober, or even calm and courteous, Chappy might have taken the time to chat with him about his God’s Work, but Chappy knew it would have been a waste of time and he had other things he needed to accomplish that day. So he pretty much ignored Hobie.

This annoyed Hobie - a lot. He began to demand and pound on the door, “I said gimme a Bible! I got a right to have a Bible! Gimme a fuckin’ Bible!”

Hobie was right. He did have the right to have a Bible. All inmates had that right and Chappy was happy to provide Bibles to anyone who asked, even though he still believed his theory about God living in the jail. But in the state Hobie was in, a Bible would have served no useful purpose and would probably have ended up in shreds on the cell floor. Experience had taught Chappy that you don’t give ammunition to a whacko, because he or she will use it against you. He did try to reason with Hobie just a little, telling him that if he would calm down and stop his pounding and threats, he would see about getting him a Bible.

Hobie was not satisfied with that, nor was he willing to try and obey. His voice kept escalating, his pounding intensified, and his demands grew more and more belligerent. “I want a fuckin’ Bible! Gimme a fuckin’ Bible or I’m gonna sue! I have a right to have a fuckin’ Bible!”

This went on for over an hour, his cursing growing more intense by the minute until his demand for a Bible could be heard from one end of the jail to the next. It was only after Chappy had completed his work at the computer and taken his time to be sure he was in control of his own annoyance, that he walked casually over to the holding cell and looked Hobie right in the eye, with a peaceful, knowing smile on his face,

“I’m really very sorry, sir,” Chappy said, “I’ve checked everywhere and I’ve located a King James Bible, a New Testament Bible, a Holy Quaran, a Mormon Bible, a Christian Scientist Reader, a Spanish language Bible and a Jehovah’s Witness Bible and Watchtower…but we are completely out of Fucking Bibles.”

Hobie’s mouth closed with a klomp! And Chappy walked quietly away.

The Saga of Nutri-Loaf (and other pointless Inmate behavior)

It has been a hotly debated topic in Arizona over the years as to who actually came up with the substance known as “Nutri-Loaf”. Our Sheriff, here in Yavapai County, claimed he was the inventor while the infamous Sheriff of Maricopa County insists the recipe was actually his. I do believe the truth is out there, but I doubt it will ever been known for sure. All we really know is that Nutri-Loaf was created as an answer for inmates who take delight in throwing their meal trays around.

One might wonder why this occurs; the throwing of meal trays, I mean. No matter what is contained on those trays, good or not so good, it is still edible food and in most cases it is all the inmates get to eat during the course of the day. Inmates have an odd “I’ll show you!” kind of attitude. It causes them to do things when they’re upset that don’t make a lot of sense. If an inmate is furious about something his lawyer has done, or the fact that his bedroll is itchy or maybe he didn’t get the medications he wanted the night before, he will often go on a hunger strike. He stops eating, shoves his trays back out the bean chute uneaten, and sits and sulks in fury on his bunk.

I wonder why they think this will accomplish anything? The officers and other employees really don’t care if someone eats or not. It doesn’t affect the officer’s stomachs and it certainly does not mean diddly-squat to their attorney or to the nurse who withheld the medication. It’s the same concept when they throw their trays and fling their food all over the walls and floors. The result is they have nothing to eat and then they have to either clean up their mess or live in squalor. Again, the officers just don’t care. The discomfort is all on the inmates, themselves, and seldom makes any significant change in whatever situation has them upset to begin with.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. What happens in the case of food fights and food riots is that those inmates no longer receive their food on trays. The relatively appetizing meals are replaced with Nutri-Loaf, served on brown paper towels, for as long as the punishment is deemed necessary. It could be a few days; it could be weeks. That’s up to whoever is dishing out the sanction.

Nutri-Loaf is made in the jail kitchen and can be almost any color and texture. It is concocted from all the ingredients for that particular meal, thrown into a giant mixer, blended with eggs to hold it all together, and baked into loaves, which are served to the inmates who are being punished. The Breakfast Loaf might be a mixture of pancakes, syrup, bacon, applesauce and cornflakes, all whizzed up with a few eggs to solidify it, then baked and sliced and served.
Lunch might be a mixture of fish sticks, beets, bread, tarter sauce, and chocolate cake, which turns a lovely shade of pink when mixed together and baked. Dinner could be chicken parts, green beans, potato wedges, lime gelatin with pears and banana pudding. That Loaf would probably have been on the greenish side.

The purpose of Nutri-Loaf was never intended to gross the inmates out, at least that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it. The theory was the inmates could not make as much of a mess, or do as much damage, if they threw around a hunk of solidified food loaf and a paper towel as they could with a hard plastic try filled with assorted food items. They also could eat the slices of Nutri-Loaf with their fingers, eliminating the possible danger of hard plastic forks.
I, myself, have eaten Nutri-Loaf. We all did. Legally, we were told we had to at least taste it to prove it was not cruel or unusual. Cruel? No. Unusual? Yes, I think it was unusual, except, maybe, for the breakfast loaf. When the breakfast food items were blended and baked it almost always ended up tasting like quiche, which was not half bad as long as you didn’t take the time to inspect all the little bits of color and texture that were floating around in the slices. Whenever we had to prove to a bleeding heart lawyer or judge that the Nutri-Loaf was just fine to consume, we always made sure it was the Breakfast Edition we ate. Later in the day it might contain hot dogs and buns with mustard and ketchup, broccoli with cheese sauce, beans and pumpkin pie, which is a combined flavor that stays with you for much too long a period.

The lawyers, judges, and to my knowledge, even the Sheriff, never ate the Nutri-Loaf. They took our word for it. Thus, they could not form an arguable opinion on whether or not Nutri-Loaf was cruel or unusual. In point of fact, the jails in Yavapai County still use it today, but I do not know about Maricopa County.

The Nutri-Loaf incident occurred when someone in Dorm Three decided to insight a riot over the loss of television privileges. The inmates in the Yavapai County jail have cable TV and can watch pretty much what they want to between seven a.m. and ten at night, as long as they are on their best behavior. The television privilege is one thing that can be taken away from them in times of punishment and apparently that was what happened that night. What caused them to lose their TV privileges is a mystery to me after all these years and really isn’t pertinent anyway.

It was one of those wannabe riots, which are mainly noise and commotion and fortunately not a lot of injury, but during the commotion there was a lot of food trays thrown about and so one of the resulting punishments was two weeks of the dread Nutri-Loaf. That began at breakfast the following morning. There were complaints and threats, of course, but the jail is pretty steadfast on that subject. When a punishment is dealt, it is followed to the letter. The main thing is that if inmates throw Nutri-Loaf around it may create a mess, but no one gets hurt from flying globs of quiche-like material.

That day was relatively uneventful, as I recall. Nutri-Loaf was served and accepted by the inmates and aside from some cursing and grumbling they did not react too angrily. This, in itself, should have been a warning that something evil was a foot! Quiet inmates are suspicious inmates. It’s like when you have a couple of three and four-year-old children who disappear and grow very still and quiet. They’re up to no-good every time. Better go check on them and be prepared. But no one thought to check on the inmates in Dorn Three. It was busy that day and we were thankful for the quiet from at least one area of the jail.
The first call came at about eight o’clock that night, from the Dispatch area; water, or something liquid, was leaking from the ceiling into Dispatch, which happened to be directly beneath Dorn Three. This call was followed by a buzzing line from the Road Deputies area downstairs - more leakage. And this time the angry shout that came over the speaker system was, “There’s friggin’ turds floatin’ down here!!” This, of course, sent those of us in the jail scrambling back to the point of the leak.

By now it was more like a waterfall than just a leak downstairs, and the liquid that contained bits of “turds” was also pouring into the Sheriff’s Office and all over his saddles, his guns, and his expensive oak furniture. Fortunately it was not pouring on the Sheriff, himself. He customarily works in the evenings but on that particular night, Fate had taken him in a different direction.

In the jail, it was pandemonium. Every toilet and drain in Dorn Three was clogged and being repeatedly flushed. The result was a sewage backup that was filling each dormitory like dominoes, spreading into and through connecting pipes. It resembled a series of little, evil-smelling geysers, bubbling and spewing not only liquid and sewage, but also great globs of Nutri-Loaf which refused to disintegrate.

We shut the water off, of course. This stopped the immediate flow and spewing geysers but did nothing to squelch the ocean of sewage and non-biodegradable Nutri-Loaf. And this is where the Pointless Behavior comes in. The inmates in Dorm three, angry over having to eat Nutri-Loaf, had shoved towels and clothing into the drains and then flushed their Nutri-Loaf, along with a day’s worth of sewage, until they managed to plug every drain in the north side of the jail. This, in turn, caused problems for the innocent employees below in Dispatch and the Deputies task area, and also flooded all the other dorms where innocent inmates lived.
But the mess downstairs would be cleaned up by inmate workers or even by a private firm, not by any of the deputies and certainly not by the Sheriff. The flooded, sewage-strewn dorms upstairs, including Dorm Three where it all began, would be cleaned up by the inmates themselves, not by any of the deputies who had imposed the Nutri-Loaf on Dorm Three in the first place. County plumbers who are paid to do just that sort of thing unclogged the clogged plumbing. They didn’t suffer any for it. The only people who really suffered from the sewage extravaganza were the inmates in Dorm Three and their companions in the rest of the jail. Where is the sense in this?

Needless to say the Nutri-Loaf was extended for a period of thirty days and all other privileges, such as visitation and recreation, were also taken away from the inmates in Dorm three. They still had their Nutri-Loaf, their cells smelled like sewage for a month no matter how much scrubbing and disinfectant was used, and they were locked down with no entertainment at all. Pointless Behavior? Ridiculous Decisions? I would say so. But maybe that’s why they were in jail to begin with, do ya think?

"Mac"

Mac was a physically small guy: about five feet four inches and maybe 115 pounds soaking wet, after a full meal. He was also a kind of irritating guy; you know, sort of like that little cartoon dog that runs around Spike the Bulldog, panting and jumping and making every effort to kiss up. Mac would buzz around the Big Dogs like a mosquito, landing anywhere he could to get their attention and doing any and all favors to win their approval. As often as not, the attention Mac ended up with was a punch in the nose to shut him up, but that never seemed to faze him. The black eyes he constantly sported from his numerous “falls in the shower” were more like badges of courage to Mac’s way of thinking. He wore them with pride.

This desire Mac had for running with the Big Dogs and being part of whatever pack he could find was what ended him up in jail in the first place. Mac was the perfect foil, the fall guy, the quintessential sucker who was always the one left holding the smoking gun or the stolen wallet. He was in and out of jail on a regular basis for shoplifting or stealing gasoline or panhandling on the Courthouse Square. His charges were mainly annoyance crimes until the fateful day he fell in with the group of White Supremacists.

I doubt Mac even knew what a White Supremacists was. He certainly did not know what they stood for, or what it was all about. In our little corner of the world there are not a lot of people of color to begin with, and so most of the Skin Head faction has to content itself with talking the talk more than walking the walk. Mac could do that; talk. He could say anything he needed to say, promote any belief that was necessary to help him fit in with a crowd. Any crowd. Mac just wanted to belong somewhere.

As it turned out, he happened to join a group that was very happy to take him into their fold. They saw the benefits of having a little dog like Mac to run circles for them and they made immediate use of him. Their victim was a couple whom they perceived to be Jewish, although this was pure speculation on their part. Their plan involved arson. Their patsy was Mac.

Mac’s role in the event was to secure gasoline and then stand guard while the Big Dogs went about setting the house on fire, at least that’s what I gathered from conversations with Mac later on. He didn’t understand why his group of new friends wanted to burn someone’s house down and he had no earthly clue what a Jew was, but it all seemed pretty exciting at the time and Mac felt proud that his new pals were all so pleased with him.

Once in the jail, however, those terrific new pals no longer wanted anything to do with their little dog and the blame for the entire arson incident was placed directly on Mac’s narrow shoulders. Mac was not seasoned in big time crime and was certainly not worldly in the ways of defending himself. Yes, he bought the gasoline. Yes, he helped watch for intruders while the fire was set. Yes, he knew it was wrong to burn someone’s house down. But when he was asked why he helped with the deed, he just looked rather blank. In truth, Mac really had no idea why.

“Because they was Jews,” he told me when we talked one afternoon.

I probably frowned slightly, “What’s a Jew, Mac?”

Another blank, puzzled look. Mac shrugged, “I dunno.” He admitted. “Maybe they is bad people.”

“What did they do that was bad?”

Mac started squirming, reaching into his mind for a reply, “Maybe - maybe they did bad things.”

“Like what? What bad things did they do, Mac?”

It wasn’t my intention to make him uncomfortable; I simply wanted to understand what was going on in his brain. Unfortunately, I did make him very ill at ease and he began looking around everywhere except in my direction. I didn’t push him anymore but he kept thinking and twisting his fingers into the shirt of his uniform until the circulation was cut off. Finally he huffed a sigh and looked back at me with a glimmer of hope in his eyes, “I think they didn’t pay their phone bill!” he proclaimed.

So there you are. It obviously made perfect sense to Mac. People who did not pay their telephone bills were punished by having their houses burned down. An unpaid electric bill might warrant a public flogging. Failure to pay your taxes, well, probably a seat in Ol’ Sparky. Mac didn’t worry about those kinds of things, he let the rest of the world make such decisions and he just went along with the friendly flow.

I don’t think he even realized what was happening when his group of friends all testified it was Mac who lit the fires. He was too confused by the entire legal process to sort out who was saying what or how it affected him. He just knew he didn’t like jail very much and he could not understand why his friends did not want to be with him anymore. It’s hard to explain something like that to someone like Mac. As far as he knew, he had done what they asked him to do and he was not objecting to the consequences. It was puzzling to him that none of it seemed to matter now that they had all been caught.

Mac ended up facing his charges under the umbrella of mental instability. I never felt he was unstable; he was just extremely naïve and trusting and pretty darned innocent when it came right down to the brass tacks. People could easily disappoint him because he believed what was told to him. His disappointment and confusion over losing the “friends” who burned down the house was something he took pretty hard.

That disappointment and confusion didn’t last too long, though. It was only a matter of a few days before Mac found a new group of pals to hang with in the dorm. All he had to do to stay buddies with his new group was to steal a few candy bars from other inmates or take the heat when a rule was broken. He might suffer a few black eyes and a week or so in solitary for his acts of devotion, but it was worth it to Mac just to be a part of something. Just to belong.

"Mac"

The shower stalls in the Yavapai County Jail are down right vicious! They don’t look exceptionally dangerous, they are your basic stainless steel boxes with three sides and a canvas shower curtain on the open, fourth side. They have a shower head which sprays lukewarm water when it’s not clogged up or dented, and a drain in the bottom, which works about 75 percent of the time. I have never noticed any shark-like teeth or raptors claws protruding from any of the corners or orifices and it is not likely the showers can sprout appendages with which to trip an inmate who is stepping in or out. So, this being the case, why is it that so many of our unwary inmates end up falling and getting hurt in those darned showers?

Must be the soap. It’s standard, jail-issue stuff that comes in small bars, similar to the soap you get at a Motel-6. There must be some property in those little bars of soap that spread evil and danger when taken into the shower stalls. I have no better explanation for all the numerous black eyes and split lips that emerge from those nemesis showers.

Maybe it’s not really the showers at all. Maybe something else is causing the injuries, such as fistfights, but that would mean the inmates are telling fibs and that is just so hard to believe. An inmate tell a lie? Nonsense! Whenever one of them appeared at roll call or meal count and was sporting a shiny new black eye or bloodied lip, I always asked them what on earth happened and it was always the same answer, “I fell in the shower.” Why would they lie about that? Why would they try to cover up something as basic and manly as a fight with some sorry excuse about falling in the shower?

After hearing this over and over for all those years I began to realize there must be something terribly wrong with the showers! I brought this up with my Sergeant and he agreed. We then compared notes with the officers on other shifts and they conferred: Inmates are being attacked on a daily basis by the showers.

So now that we had a pattern and a suspect in the injuries, it became necessary to find the third aspect: Motive. Why would a stainless steel shower stall want to render injury to the inmates who used it? Going back to the beginning of this epic, one might recall the comments made about the jail aromas. They can be fierce. Is it possible the showers are so repulsed by the smells they have to put up with each and every day that they revolt and lash out in disgust at what washes down their drains?

Makes sense, I suppose, except that those ripe aromas are rather collective and do not emanate from any one particular individual. On occasion there are inmates who do practice some form of hygiene and do not smell like moldy teeth and unwashed underwear. So then, why is it that even some of these relatively clean and sanitary men end up with black eyes and bruises from attacks by the showers?

Well, one can only assume the whole thing is a farce. These battered inmates are not falling or otherwise catapulting around in the showers at all! The showers are innocent! They have nothing to do with the injuries and are simply patsies for some other evil force of nature. My conclusion is that the other inmates are responsible. There are fistfights going on, or attacks of one kind or another, and the showers are being blamed to keep it all as secretive as possible. And did it really take me weeks or months of pondering to come to that conclusion? No, of course not, but proving otherwise was nearly impossible...

...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.

"Howard"

My parents told me many moons ago that I should never, ever pick up a hitchhiker. Hitchhikers were dangerous people who had only one reason for their lonely activity, and that was to find and attack young women drivers who were silly enough to stop and give them a ride. I never argued this point with my parents and unless I recognized the person by the side of the road that was thumbing for a ride, I never stopped to pick him up. Well, almost never. But I had my driver’s license the day I turned sixteen, and I had my own car before I ever turned sixteen, so the rule to never pick up a hitchhiker was broken on occasion in spite of my parental warnings.

I was given the keys to a 1962 bright red Corvair convertible. My Dad bought it for me when I was about fifteen and a half and the neighbor boy had to drive me to school in it until I turned old enough to drive it myself. Was I spoiled? Yup. But I also believe it was just one of my Dad’s fantasies; to have a red convertible. Being a family man and an executive it wasn’t likely he would have one for himself. Besides, my mother was never the red convertible type.

The red Corvair was the perfect vehicle for stuffing friends and surfboards in the back and heading to the coast. Gas was cheap back then; there were still Gas Wars and it could often be had for twenty cents a gallon and the roads were uncrowded. It was the perfect summertime escape and surfing was one of the best ways to spend a day. Sometimes, however, we left the surfboards at home and headed a bit further south than our usual haunts down to San Diego.

My parents never knew this. They would not have cared about my trekking to San Diego itself, they were pretty lenient with me in that aspect, but if they had known we drove to San Diego for the express purpose of meeting sailors or other male types– well - that might have been another story. It was not acceptable behavior for a sixteen-year-old girl to stop and pick up sailors or surfers along the highway, but we did it - my pals and I. If it was just myself and one other girl we would limit ourselves to two sailors or surfers in the car. If there were three of us it would be a trio of sailors or surfers, and so on, as many as would fit.

When I say, “pick up” I mean that in the most direct sense of the word. We picked them up and gave them rides to wherever they were headed. Typically that was either away from or back to their ships or up the coast to a better set of waves. It only amounted to flirting, conversation, and if we were lucky, lunch. Nothing awful ever happened. Then again it was 1963 and times were a lot different, but I suppose it was still not a terribly smart thing to do.

The dead girl lying on the morgue table had picked up a hitchhiker, although at that moment the detectives did not know what had really happened. She had been strangled and her body had been found in a small motel room along Highway 17 north of Phoenix and well inside the Yavapai County line.

She had no identification on her and in such cases it is common to run a photo of the victim in the local newspapers to try and locate next of kin. This is possible if the victim doesn’t appear dead, but in the case of this young woman it was very obvious she wasn’t living and it would have been a very shocking thing if her mother had picked up the Sunday paper and seen her daughter’s morgue photo on the front page with a caption that read: “Do you know this woman?”

So, Forensic Woman to the rescue.

The request of me was to make her “look alive”, just as they had instructed me to do with Baby Doe. It was much easier this time, however. The victims’ features were in tact, I could even tell her hazel eye color. The features were a bit distorted in her death rigor but my imagination had no trouble putting them back into their rightful proportions. The resulting sketch was of a rather attractive, blonde, twenty-something woman. I didn’t reproduce the severe bruising about her throat and face.

Meanwhile, detectives had done their own footwork and found a name in the motel register belonging to one Howard Smith. Neither Howard nor Smith were his real names but we’ll use them for the purpose of this story. The motel manager also remembered that Mr. Smith was a very young man and extremely tall. Six foot five at least. He had the license number of the car Mr. Smith had arrived in. With these clues, they put out a warrant for the arrest of Mr. Howard Smith; just about the time I was drawing a postmortem sketch of his victim for newspaper publication...

Baby Doe

A morgue has a unique smell, at least the morgue here in Prescott does. It doesn’t smell like death so much as it smells like eucalyptus oil and antiseptic, although there is that lingering hint of decomposition always in the air, like a mist that drifts along the ceiling and floors and waits for someone to stir it up. Baby Doe smelled to me like wet charcoal.

I get a knot in my stomach even now when I think back and recall that small, burned infant lying there. It did not sicken me, exactly, because she honestly did not look real. She resembled a life-sized baby doll that had been cast away at a dump site and incinerated. What I felt was revulsion and anger so intense I remember breaking out in a sweat and clenching my teeth until my jaw ached. What kind of animal could do this to a baby? And why would they do such a thing?

Detectives already had a fairly good idea of why it had happened. The assumption was that the baby had been accidentally killed by her parents, perhaps a Shaken Baby Syndrome event or simply parental anger over a fussy, crying child that went too far. As it eventually turned out, they were right, but in the meantime it was still a case of trying to identify Baby Doe.
It is extremely difficult to draw a sketch when your fingers are clenched like a vise on the pencil and your eyes are blurry with tears. I kept picturing my own daughter’s face, even though she was an adult by then, and wondering if Baby Doe’s parents were remembering her? Then I wondered, when the person or persons responsible for her death were finally found, could there ever be a jury that would be able to look past the burned, little child and give unbiased attention to any other facts? Of course, what possible reason could there ever be for anyone to set a child on fire? My thoughts ran amuck as I did my best to bring some semblance of life to Baby Doe’s face. She deserved to be remembered and identified as the sweet, beautiful child she had been before a monster ended her life.

The sketch turned out very well I thought, at least as far as I could tell. It ran in the newspapers and was shown on TV a few times, along with the skull reconstruction, and each time it was exhibited to the public we received another barrage of telephone calls from concerned citizens. This went on for several weeks and every time I saw the image I had drawn, or the reconstruction of that tiny skull, I could feel my stomach knot up with anger. I was very afraid it would become a Cold Case and that Baby Doe would gradually be forgotten. I wanted the person or persons who were responsible for ending her young life to have to answer for their crimes. Not only in another life someday, but here and now, where I could see their faces and maybe have some inkling of why they had done such a hateful thing.
Bay Doe was eventually identified, but not from my drawing or the skull reconstruction. It was another process of witnesses and two-plus-two-equals-four police work. That’s what the detectives do and they do it very well. Amazingly, there was a definite resemblance to her features in my drawing and also in the skull reconstruction, so I felt good about that. It was also good to know her killers, her own parents, were found and the punishment was dealt. As suspected, Baby Jane Doe had been a victim of Shaken Baby Syndrome. Her parents were living in Las Vegas and had chosen a stretch of Arizona highway to discard of their child’s body. Eventually a neighbor got suspicious and reported to the police that she had not seen the little girl next door for quite a while. That was all it took for the investigation to reach an end, even though it took some time.

I still think about Baby Doe from time to time, even after all these years, especially when I am around my own grandchildren. She was a hard way for me to begin my sideline of post-mortem identification sketches but it also gave me a feeling of accomplishment. I felt that if I could get through that drawing, I could probably handle almost anything forensics sent my way, and I was right.

Dead People I Have Known

The term Forensic Artist or Composite Artist means different things to different people. I believe that for most of the population it conjures up a mental image of a man or woman in a suit with a briefcase full of artists supplies, a nice, quiet office in which to work with the witness, and a hefty paycheck at the end of the day. The truth is that very few people actually make their living being Forensic/Composite Artists. There just isn’t enough constant work to keep them busy. It is typically a sideline. Those who have the professional title of Forensic/Composite Artist generally do a lot more than draw or reconstruct faces. They either are involved in teaching the subject to certification classes or they give lectures or are professional witnesses. It is a unique job and actually there are very few people who are truly good at the task. More often than not, it is someone like myself, who works in conjunction with the Police or Sheriff’s Office or some other facet of the law enforcement world and happens to have a talent for drawing faces and
interviewing. In fact, I have often argued that those people who do forensic or composite drawings are not really artists at all. This has nothing to do with creating art. It certainly takes a high degree of talent but it has little to do with expression or creativity.

Notice I did not say a talent for drawing portraits. A composite sketch is not a portrait. It is the reproduction of someone’s memory, or at least that’s what we attempt to do. Most people who witness a crime or are involved as a victim, are pretty stressed at the moment of the crime and end up being somewhat traumatized. If four people witness a convenience store holdup you may have to interview each of those four people to get an idea of what the holdup guy really looked like. One will recall a pair of dark, angry eyes while another will have concentrated on the Fu Manchu moustache and a third will say he was missing an ear. The fourth witness may tell you the perp was a woman in men’s clothing. It’s not an easy task.

Since the artist is drawing a memory, however, it is pretty important to get to the witness as soon as possible. If the memory is over three days old it has probably faded too much to give accurate information. This being the case, the idea of a composite artist sitting in a nice office with a briefcase full of supplies goes directly out the window.

I have done composite drawings with a Number 2 pencil on the back of a bank statement while sitting on the tailgate of an old pickup truck. If that’s where the witness is, that’s where you do the drawing. If you have no supplies with you, you use what you can find. The important thing is to not allow the memory to get old. You also have to know how to draw out that memory. This is where interviewing becomes vital. A forensic artist has to have the ability to interview, to bring out the memory that is stuffed away inside the witness or victim’s head. The more traumatized the witness or victim, the harder this may be, especially with children. To them, every bad guy looks like Freddy Kruger or Cruella DeVille.

Drawing dead people is a lot easier. I can honestly say “I see dead people!” or at least I have seen dead people. Several times. This is typically in the course of trying to identify a victim, someone who has been found deceased with no ID to allow the authorities to notify next of kin or go about solving the crime. It’s extremely difficult to find a killer when you don’t know who the victim is. Naturally the authorities will attempt to match fingerprints, if there are fingerprints to use, but not everyone on earth has a record of their prints on file, especially when it’s a young person.

My first forensic experience in a morgue had to do with the case of Baby Doe. A man and his son were riding horseback along the fence line that follows the highway north of Phoenix when they spotted what they thought to be a burned, discarded doll lying in the brush near the side of the highway. Closer inspection proved the doll was, in fact, a burned human child. There were no fingerprints and even if there had been, a child of that age (a year old or thereabouts) would certainly not have any record on file.

Baby Doe was severely burned but there were some tiny, charred features still in tact. This being the case, authorities decided to attempt to identify the child by means of a composite sketch and then a facial reconstruction from the infant’s skull. It would have been far too traumatic for the general public to see a photograph of the actual, burned baby on the front page of the newspaper with the headline: “Do you recognize this child?” A lifelike drawing is always much more acceptable in any public identification. The problem with this is that on a very young child the features are somewhat generic and reproducing them by two or three-dimensional means is like grasping at smoke. I agreed to try a sketch, however, leaving the three-dimensional skull reconstruction to someone who had been at that job much longer than I.

Easy out...

Then again, one of the very best escapes I can recall had to do with good old Sergeant Scramble. I’m not even sure it can be classified as an escape. It was more like a “kick-out”.

The jail, as I’ve mentioned, is on the second floor of a three-story building and is lined along the front and two sides by big, old sycamore trees. Unless an inmate is a Trusty who is sentenced to County Time, he or she has no business being outside the building, or even off of the second floor. And there are no circumstances when any Trusty is allowed outside at night, with the exception of winter when an occasional snowstorm makes it necessary for the Trusties to shovel the parking area. During these rare occasions, there is always an officer with them to supervise.
I don’t remember the inmate’s name so we’ll call him “Billy-Bob”. That’s a pretty common name among inmates, along with Spike, Bubba, Jose and John Doe. At any rate, how he had gotten outside the main building is unknown at this time, or else I was never informed or have forgotten, but somehow on one dark summer night, Billy-Bob managed to slip the surly bonds of the jail and was up on the roof with one thing on his mind: Escape.

The only way from the third floor rooftop to the ground is by way of the big sycamore trees that formed a kind of canopy between the jail and the street. Being young, agile, and in a desperate and foolish mode, Billy-Bob made it in a leap from rooftop to sycamore tree and was gradually beginning his decent when Sgt. Scramble happened to wander outside for a smoke.

It must have been a moment frozen in time: Billy-Bob hanging from the limbs of the sycamore tree, hovering just below the rooftop of the jail, while Sgt. Scramble stood below, lighting a cigarette and looking up at the man in the jail uniform who was looking back at him. How easy it would have been for Sgt. Scramble to call for help, to stop the escaping inmate and be the hero of the hour. What gratitude the sheriff and all the community would have shown him for keeping a dangerous criminal in the safe confines of the jail and off the streets. He might even have received a certificate or medal, and he certainly would have gotten a mountain of kudos from the Command Staff, the courts and the lawyers. It would have been so simple. So wondrous! It would have gone down in the annals of jail history as one of those glorious moments when a Sergeant proved his invaluable status. It would have, if it hadn’t been Sgt. Scramble.
Instead, he shook his fist at the escaping inmate, who was wearing his orange jail uniform, and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Hey! You! What’re you doing on jail property! Get down out of that tree and get out of here!”

And Billy-Bob obeyed.

The Great Escapes

As long as you have prisoners behind bars you will also have prisoners attempting to get out from behind those bars. Can you blame them? Being held captive, in any form or situation, is not a natural state of affairs for humans or animals alike and any one of us would do our best to alleviate that situation if we could. It is said that captive wolves will chew their own legs off to get free of a trap. My mother had a canary named Dickie that chewed its toes off, but I think that had another implication to it, something akin to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Escape attempts are not uncommon in any jail and we certainly had our share. I mentioned earlier the three Amigos who got out through an air vent and wound up being hosted in an elderly couple’s home until the SWAT team arrived. And there was an inmate who escaped through the roof of the Rec yard and stayed on the loose for a number of years before his own son turned him in.

Work Furlough inmates now and then get the itch to run, too. They leave for work from the jail and for some strange reason, decide not to return that night. It’s like some big stupid cell in their brain takes over and they lose all concept of rational thinking. Their feet begin to move in a direction away from the jail and they end up hitchhiking to Lodi or Tonopah or some other little known outpost. Ah - life on the lam!

The maximum amount of time anyone can be sentenced to jail in Yavapai County is 365 days. Some inmates are there longer than that, but only if they are awaiting trial on major cases. Prison is another thing, that’s for long-term confinement. But the County jail is for less serious offenders and a year or less is as much time as they can do. When they are given a work furlough it is usually after they have already been in jail for a while and so that amount of time is typically much less than a year, four to six months is the average.

When a person does not return to the jail at the end of his work furlough day, he or she is charged with escape, which is an automatic two year sentence in DOC (Department of Corrections). They are not ignorant of this, they know the consequences. So it always has amazed me when a work furlough inmate turns heel and goes on the lam. Let’s weigh this for a moment: six months of work release jail time, or two years prison? Hmmm…big decision. Still, they do attempt it now and then. To date, I believe they have all been apprehended.

There are other ways of trying to escape jail as well. We’ve had inmates swallow weird objects or purposefully break bones to try and get to the hospital for a chance to break away. This has come close to being successful once or twice but so far, to my knowledge, no one has made it.
And then there was Noel, who managed to crawl up into the ceiling from the visitation area and ended up getting hopelessly lost. You have to understand how the jail is constructed to fully get the picture. Yavapai County Jail takes up the second floor of a three-story building and so there is no free space to speak of above or below; just a crawl space area for pipes, vents and electrical wiring. That crawl space is crisscrossed with metal beams, separating it into compartments with the express reason of foiling such escape attempts. Anything larger than a cockroach would have trouble navigating about. If Noel had found his way into an air duct, and was thin enough to wriggle through, he might have eventually found sunlight, but he was not and did not.

It was no secret he had made his way from visitation up into the ceiling. It was also no secret he would be stuck up there and would, in time, have to come back down. So everyone waited. It was summer, it was hot, and there was no food or water or sanitation stations in the crawl space above the ceiling, so it had to be a simple matter of time. We began taking bets on how long Noel could hold out.

It was Lena who made the bust. She had come a long way from her fateful involvement with Misty and the wet roll of cash, and by then she was very good at manipulating inmates into doing what she wanted them to do. She learned that from me, I might add. I was the best inmate-manipulator in the County. It was three days after Noel’s celebrated escape attempt up into the crawl space and Lena was standing just outside the visitation door, not fifteen feet from where Noel had climbed up through the ceiling tiles, when she heard a still, small voice from above, “Leeenaahhh…helllp meee!”

Lena’s reaction was to look up and around in the direction of the faint voice, but all she saw were ceiling tiles, “Yeah? Who’s that?” she asked.

“It’s me – Noel- I’m dyin’ up here - get me out!”

The reaction from Lena was hysterical laughter. The same reaction came from all the officers who dragged Noel, dehydrated, hungry, and filthy from the confines of the ceiling crawl space. He was covered with insulation and dirt, which in turn had swathed his body in an oozing rash. His hair was full of cobwebs and bugs, his pupils were dilated to the size of nickels from being in the dark, and he had worn his elbows and knees raw trying to maneuver about.

Noel was not charged with attempted escape even though we could have done so. Everyone figured he had suffered enough. Even Noel admitted the plan was not a brilliant one. His body finally healed and he got his dignity back to some degree, but no one who was there that day has ever forgotten his mournful, pitiful voice emanating from the ceiling by the visitation room, “Leeenaahh…helllp meee…”

Knowing this difficulty, and for their own sanity as well as ours, the INS had given each Mohammed a wrist band with his photo, his name and his Federal ID number. The photos were all fairly interchangeable but when put with the name Mohammed-Something it did help somewhat to identify who was who.

Then along came Sergeant C. We’ll call him that for lack of anything less incriminating. Sgt. C was a heck of a guy, but just a little bit over the top when it came to jail management. Actually he was over the top and on his way down into the chasm. He was known as Sgt. Scramble.

My first impression of Sgt. C was his unquenchable appetite. The man was a human mulching machine. This was a middle-aged man who was quite slender and not very tall, so where he put the mountains of food he consumed never ceased to puzzle me. He was polite about it, though. He would wait until all the inmate trays had gone out and the rest of the staff had gone through the kitchen food line and then Nellie Bar The Door! Anything left was fair game and after Sgt. C was finished, there was nary a crumb.

Didn’t matter what was served, either. From tacos to tuna, Sgt. C would pile it all up onto his plate, sometimes onto two plates, and carry it on down to the lunchroom to feast. I recall the looks on everyone’s faces as they watched him devour his concoctions; looks of absolute astonishment. It was rumored that Sgt. C did not eat at home, although no reason was ever given for that. According to said rumor, his only meal during the day was whatever he could consume at work in the jail. Some of the Trustys who worked in the kitchen said they saw him stuffing fruit and cookies into his uniform pockets, too, but you had to consider the source of that rumor. It came from inmates who made hooch out of old fruit cocktail and yeast. What did they know? At any rate, there was even a period of time when amazing things began disappearing from the jail refrigerator during the night shift: enormous roasts of beef, gallons of milk, twenty-pound wheels of cheese. Some blamed the missing food on Sgt. C. Personally; I think it was the jail ghost. But that’s another story and we’ll get to him later on.

Meanwhile, Sgt. Scramble was there to take over when the INS officers arrived with their twenty-eight Mohammeds. He was good at that sort of thing, taking over, I mean. He was not particularly good at accomplishing whatever he took over, but he did have a knack for intervening and taking charge. He was gracious with the INS officers and assured them we would take the very best of care of the Mohammeds during their stay, which was to be approximately ten days.

“Not to worry,” Sgt. C proclaimed, “We’ve emptied out a whole dorm for them so they’ll have lots of privacy and the utmost safety.”

And then, as the pleased INS officers drove away, Sgt. C proceeded to remove all the Mohammeds’ identification wristbands.

The reasoning for this, he assured us, was that INS wristbands did not fit the guidelines for Yavapai County safety measures. They had metal pieces on them and the plastic could be used to cut things, like flesh. At the time, Yavapai County did not use any identification on the inmates. Nowadays we also use wristbands, but back then there was, as yet, no such thing. Sgt. C would not allow the Mohammeds to have anything on their person that the rest of the jail population did not have. They were changed from their white robes into orange uniforms and promptly marched up to the second floor where their dorm awaited.

Each inmate in Yavapai County jail is issued a bedroll, which consists of a mattress, sheets, soap, toothbrush & paste, shampoo, and a towel. Within five minutes of placing the twenty-eight Mohammends into the dorm, every one of them had their towel wrapped securely about their head. No jokes, please, they truly did have their towels on their heads. It was as close to their traditional mode of attire as they could come. Why the County was never sued for this infraction of religious culture is a mystery to me, but it did not occur.

The following ten days were pure Hell for the officers in the jail, including Yours Truly. We had absolutely no clue which Mohammed was which. No one knew who had been served his meals, who had gotten the correct medication, whose commissary was going to whom, and the Mohammeds did nothing to help. If they spoke English, which I was pretty sure most of them did, they refused to acknowledge it. If you called out “Mohammed Nassim!” when trying to serve the meal trays, twenty-eight small, dark men with towels on their heads would raise their hands and shout “Ey! Ey!”, which I was pretty sure was Islamic for “Dumb Yankee!”
The Yavapai County jail, much like all jails in the nation, uses certain inmates to work as Trustys. These men and women have to meet certain criteria to earn that position and they are rewarded for their work with privileges of varying kinds. Trustys work from sun-up to dark and often through the night and sleep is one of those rare and valuable things. The dorm in which the Mohammeds were placed happened to be right next to the Trusty dorm. Only a single wall of cinder block separated the Mohammeds from our working inmates and the jail kitchen, and thanks to a myriad of air vents in and about that area, sound traveled with amazing speed and clarity. This was a good thing when it came to security issues because officers could hear when fights or arguments broke out, and it was easy to shout for a Trusty when you needed one to help with some task. It was not, however, a good thing when the chanting started.

Just at midnight, the first night and every night thereafter for ten nights in a row, twenty-eight Mohammeds sat in their individual cells on the dormitory floor, towels on their heads, and chanted at the top of their lungs. Knowing very little about Islam, I had no idea if this activity was truly a part of their religious culture or if they did it simply to annoy everyone. I suspect it was the latter because the chanting did not take place at any other time than in the middle of the night when the rest of the jail was quiet as a tomb.

The Trustys suffered the most, as the off-key wailing came directly from beyond their dorm wall. I don’t think anyone would have complained too much if the Mohammeds were harmonizing to Stardust, but the uneven, nerve shattering chants that welled up from beyond their cell doors were more like an army of cats with their tails being ripped off by iguanas. It was akin to fingernails on a blackboard, or perhaps bagpipes under water.

Actually, there is no description that really gives a true feeling of the sound. Suffice to say it was enough to send the Trustys over the edge. They began hurling shoes and books at the wall and shouting unmentionable threats. The instinct of the officers was to try and stop the Trustys from acting out at the Mohammeds but in all truth we officers were as annoyed by the noise as the Trustys. All we could do was order them to quiet down or threaten to dish out punishment if they did not obey, such as stopping commissary or not allowing recreation or phone privileges, which they did not care about anyway. Their response was the usual, “Ey? Ey?”

The Mohammeds finally left our facility eleven days later, but only after several hours of mass confusion involving which Mohammed was which. It resembled the Keystone Cops with deputies and Federal agents stumbling about and over one another in an attempt to replace the wristbands Sgt. Scramble had so adeptly removed. I’m pretty sure none of the Mohammeds really cared, just as I am sure very few of them got the correct wristband. I am also pretty sure most of them were back in the USA within six weeks of their deportment. At least they did not come back and chant at midnight in the Yavapai County jail.

The Mohammeds

The freedom to practice our own religion, in our own way, is one of our basic rights. It was the reason this country was originally founded and it has been the foundation of many lawsuits, orders, amendments, changes, arguments, joy and progress over the years. There are a few legal restrictions, but not many. If a person decided he wanted to start a Church of Holy Auburn Dissection in which the main belief is the drawing and quartering of people with red hair, his church and his beliefs would most likely not be allowed. But for the most part our government is very tolerant of beliefs and opinions that are stated in the name of Religion.

It is much the same in the jails and prisons. Inmates and prisoners have a right to practice their religion, within limits. If the religion is sanctified, organized and has a base in some sort of Higher Power, jails and prisons are expected to do as much as they can to allow those followers to practice the ideals, services, diets and other cultural aspects of their belief. If an Hassidic Jew comes into jail and states he cannot eat pork, the jail must provide him kosher, pork-free meals. Catholics must be offered a substitute for red meat on Fridays, Native Americans cannot be forced to cut their hair, Islamics cannot be served beef, etc. One questions what a true Hassidic, Catholic or Islamic would be doing in jail in the first place, as well as a Native American who followed his tribe’s traditions and beliefs.

On the other hand, Vegetarianism is not a religion, it is a choice, and so the Vegetarian must make do with whatever meals are served to him or her and choose what he or she wants from the tray. It’s a fine line sometimes, but if jail and prison dieticians had to fix special meals for everyone who did not like fish or believed peanut butter was an alien plot to gum up the brains of our youth (yes, I ran into that once) they would be creating trays twenty-four hours a day and the cost would be astronomical.

Satanism and Witchcraft (Wicca) are tough ones in the jails. They are very organized religions with many followers and for reasons that seem somewhat obvious to me, they are popular among the drug-using crowd. They are not, however, recognized religions, at least not within the framework of law enforcement. Satanists scare the Hell out of other people. And the fear factor in a jail is high enough without adding a circle of men with blankets over their heads, mumbling Gregorian chants at midnight. Hence, the practice of Satanism is not allowed in the Yavapai County jail, although there are a number of inmates whom I have come across who profess to being Satanists.

The other, more recent phenomenon is Odinism. This is popular among the White Supremists and stems from ancient Celtic and Viking times when Odin ruled with his lightening bolts and Druids partied in the woods under big rocks. I’m not sure how White Pride fits in with Druids and Celts but somehow they have evolved into a pseudo-match. At any rate, some of the Odinists we have had in jail claimed to be Vegetarians by religion. So have some who follow other, better known religions, but unless it can be proved in their church’s bylaws, the jail considers it a preference and they get meat just like everyone else.

So into the picture, one fine day, came the Federal order that Yavapai County was going to play temporary host to twenty-eight Islamics who were being held by INS (Immigration & Naturalization Services) for the purpose of deporting them back to the Middle East. This was in the days before terrorists were running rampant and we had no colored code for daily terrorist activity. These deportees were not considered to be exceptionally dangerous. They were not mad bombers or carriers of anthrax; they were simply here, in the USA illegally and had been involved in some sort of criminal activity that got them noticed. Typically it had to do with drugs or some sort of fraudulent schemes.

The INS had been extremely careful in the process of identifying and tagging these men. Every one of them was named Mohammed-Something. There was Mohammed Nassim, Mohammed Ismeal, Mohammed-Jamal, Mohammed Al-Duran, well, you get the picture. On top of that they were all slender, had black facial hair and seemed to be the same age. We had a booking area full of white-robed identical men who shared the same first name: Mohammed.

Crystal did finally tell me what happened to her boyfriend, though, but only after all chance of her plea bargain for twenty-five years being reneged was past. Let me set the stage a little before I get into her story. Crystal was an adorable, little gal: blonde, blue-eyed, freckled, with a turned up nose and a dimpled smile. If your son took her to the prom you would be thrilled. You would take a dozen snapshots of the darling couple and rave to your friends at how cute and sweet and adorable your son’s girlfriend was. And you would tell them how smart she seemed, how personable, how “likeable”. You might notice just a hint of coolness in her blue eyes, like when she looked at you she sort of looked through you, but you would throw that aside as just teenage idiosyncrasies and a little bit of shyness. Crystal was the perfect, All-American girl.

Crystal’s boyfriend, we’ll call him Stuart, was a handsome, smart, affable young man from a well-to-do California family. He was a student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who got good grades, mostly stayed out of trouble, and was making his parents very proud. He was assured of having a boundless future after he graduated. He had, as they say, “everything going for him”.

Then he met Crystal, the All-American girl. Stuart probably did like to party a little because that was no doubt how he met Crystal, but what nineteen-year-old boy doesn’t tip a beer now and then? It was also likely he and Crystal had partied in that same mine where Stuart finally ended up. I doubt he had any foresight into this eventuality.

Crystal and Stuart dated for some time before the murder took place. During this time, Crystal told me they were prone to “pillow talk” and had spent a lot of hours in bed, sharing cold beer and a puff or two of good weed and just talking. She also told me she came to realize she may have talked a little too much while under the influence of beer and weed because Stuart began asking her little questions about the murder of the girl several months before and how much Crystal may have known.

Also during their time together, Crystal had gained access to Stuart’s bank account. It was never made clear to me if this was with Stuart’s approval or not, only that Crystal took it beyond a casual twenty dollars here and there for gasoline. When Stuart began to complain, and then finally told her to stop raiding his checking account, Crystal grew angry and several rather violent arguments ensued. A breakup was inevitable.

But Crystal realized if they broke up, as angry as Stuart was over the theft from his bank account, he might just go to the authorities with the information he had gleaned from her during their pillow talks: information about the murdered girl whose case had not yet been solved. Crystal, being the clever little sociopath that she was, decided it might be best if Stuart and his information just disappeared. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, she told me.
Stuart was learning to fly and so many of their dates had involved driving out by the local airport at night and smooching in the car while watching the planes come and go. On that fateful, dark night their smooching and plane watching was interrupted by Crystal’s pistol and Stuart wound up in the trunk of the car like so much luggage. Access to his bank account was now much easier; at least until she was caught, and the information she had regarding the murder of the other girl would remain a secret.

Crystal ended up going to prison for killing Stuart and she took her secrets with her, but during her time in jail it was overheard by other girls in her dorm, that she was bragging about how Stuart was not her first kill. All of this was hearsay, of course, and never brought to light, but I, for one, never put it past her. In all my years spent working in the Yavapai County jail, that pretty, freckled, All-American girl had the most empty, emotionless eyes I have ever seen.

Into the mine!

Crystal blew her boyfriend away with a small caliber pistol and carried his body around in the trunk of her car during the heat of August until the neighbors began to complain about the smell. At that point she hired a friend with a pickup truck and they hauled the body up to a local mine where they proceeded to drag him down two hundred feet of dark tunnel and drop him into a shaft.

I was called on by one of the detectives to help them with the case by drawing a forensic diagram of the mine. Crystal was insisting she had no help in disposing of her boyfriend and the detectives wanted to prove there was at least one other person involved. They were pretty sure that five foot two inch, one hundred pound Crystal was not capable of carrying a decomposing body down two hundred feet of mine tunnels by herself, and they wanted to show the court why they felt that way. They knew the body had been carried and not dragged, but even if Crystal could have dragged the dead weight, it was so far decomposed that dragging it would have left bits and pieces in clumps and it would have disintegrated before she got it to the actual drop.

I had been in mines before. When I was growing up in Southern California we lived in an area of Orange County where there were some very old cobalt mines in the red earth hills behind the orange groves and houses. My pals and I used to spend hours playing in those caves. We even lit fires in them and played Davy Crockett or Cave Man, which was so incredibly dangerous I shudder now at the thought of it. My parents had no idea where I was or what I was up to but I’m sure if they had known, they would have put a quick and immediate halt to it. Nowadays those hills are covered with expensive homes and the old mines have been cemented over, but somewhere in their depths are the cave dweller drawings made by me and my friends back in 1957.

At any rate, I did not find the idea of going into that mine especially intimidating. It seemed like fun to me. I was ready, in my blue jeans and spelunker boots, pencils and drawing pad in hand, to help solve the murder at hand. It started to take on darker tones when the detectives and mining engineer ordered me to put on an air tank “just in case we run into any poisonous gasses”.

I am verifiably claustrophobic, folks. Telling me to put an air mask over my head and face was akin to telling me to shove banana peels up my nose and tape my lips shut. I was not happy about this and I let them know why. There was simply no way I was going to be able to follow them inside a mine wearing a Self Contained Breathing Apparatus. Nope. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent at this juncture.

The discussion was lengthy and they made every bargain with me that they could think of but I stood my ground. I know how unpleasant I am when I’m hysterical. It’s not a pretty sight. And head masks make me hysterical. I almost had a fatal anxiety attack once when I put on a Crash Dummy suit for some school kids years ago. The head mask on that suit felt like being sealed up in a sarcophagus. The SCBA mask was even worse.

Finally a deal was made. They really needed their diagram and I was the only forensic artist the county had on hand. So, grudgingly, the mining engineer allowed me to carry the pack on my back without the mask on. I could hook the mask on my belt and swing it up into place if poisonous gas was detected. Of course he knew and I knew that if any poisonous gasses were detected it would be from me falling down dead, because they were all wearing their breathing masks, so how would they know?

Fortunately there were no poisonous gasses. I am as sure of this as I am sitting here writing this memoir. If there had been any poisonous gasses I would be six feet under. But I fear this is another digression.

The mine in question had long been used as a “party spot” by some of our local youth. The walls going back about twenty feet were smudged with campfire soot and decorated with various graffiti. The floor of the mine tunnel was strewn with cigarette butts, food wrappers, used condoms (hooray for safe sex) and various and sundry bits of trash. There was even a hypodermic needle or two and a five-dollar bill, which I spotted and picked up faster than you can say “cheap”. This has proved to be a sticking point with me over the years. The detective in front of me said he needed to take the fiver for possible evidence and that after the case was settled I could have it back. Needless to say, that never happened. I never saw my five dollar bill again. It probably isn’t in the evidence locker, either, if you get my drift.

Beyond this point in the mine it apparently grew too dark for the partiers to wander because the signs of human habitation disappeared. In the stark glow of the detective’s flashlights, the floor of the tunnel was little more than sand, powdery dirt and pebbles…with patches of human hair and skin here and there along the way. The first detective marked each piece of remains with a little numbered flag and photographed it while the second detective helped me with a tape measure. We catalogued the length, depth and width of the tunnel back to the shaft where the victim was dumped so that I could reproduce it to scale when I got back home.

It had been quite a while since the young man had met his death and been dumped into the mineshaft until that day I ventured into the mine to produce a diagram for the courts; possibly three or four months, maybe more. I only mention this because even after all that time, the unmistakable aroma of death and decomposing remains was lingering like fog in the air. If you ever have the distinct displeasure of smelling a dead body you will never forget. I guarantee it.

My diagram turned out fantastic. Everyone said it was perfect, very professional and exactly what the Prosecution needed to make its case. They were sure Crystal had an accomplice and they wanted to nail him/her. But before they could, Crystal’s attorney struck up a plea bargain and Crystal accepted it, so there was no trial, no diagram in court, and the accomplice remained nameless. The detectives were not happy with this for one compelling reason: there had been an unsolved murder of a girl a year or two before and it was thought that Crystal either had taken part in that murder or knew who did. It was also suspected that whoever helped her take the body of her boyfriend up to the mineshaft had knowledge of the murder. The detectives hoped she might turn over that information on her accomplice if it looked like it would make things easier for her. She did not do that and the case of the murdered girl is now Cold.

The darling 'Crystal' and other insanities

It is a debatable thing, when people claim they have committed a crime under the guise of “insanity”. You hear it often, “temporary insanity” or “innocent by reason of insanity” or even “guilty, but insane.” The only way I could buy into this defense is if the person committing the crime was genuinely whacko (medical term, remember) enough that he or she did not know right from wrong. That would make sense. If a person did not know what he or she was doing was wrong, then he or she probably should not be held responsible.

Take for example a one-year-old baby throwing Mom’s diamond ring in the toilet. Baby has no clue it’s wrong or that Mom will be upset, Baby just enjoys watching the glittering, ten thousand dollar rock skitter to the bottom of the porcelain bowl. So Baby is not held responsible. Whereas, if thirty-year-old Dad throws Mom’s diamond in the toilet, well, that’s an entirely different scenario. Chances are he knows the ring is worth ten thousand dollars and that Mom will really be tweaked out of shape by his actions. That’s probably why he threw it in the john to begin with. He wanted to get even for the stack of old Playboy magazines she threw in the Safeway dumpster the week before. But again, I digress.

When a man catches his neighbor in bed with the man’s wife, gets pissed off, pulls out a gun and shoots his neighbor, then digs a hole in his rose garden and buries his neighbor to hide the crime that man knows exactly what he is doing. He is trying to disguise the crime. Why? Because he knows it is wrong to blow your neighbor away, even if the neighbor was diddling the man’s wife. He knows he will be arrested, tried, and possibly spend a hefty lump of time in an eight by eight foot cell with a room mate named “Earl” or “Bubba”.

On the other hand, if a raging schizophrenic is hearing demons and seeing the corner newsboy as an incarnation of Satan and he then runs across the street with a knife and stabs the newsboy in front of everyone, he probably isn’t responsible for his actions. At that moment he did not know right or wrong, he was acting out of terror and impulse. He did not stalk or plan the crime and he did not have the sanity to try and hide it. If he had hidden in a dark alley and stabbed the newsboy Satan in secret, when no one was watching, and then stuffed his body into a dumpster, well, it might be questionable as to whether or not he knew it was wrong to kill the newsboy. I would hold my judgment on that and let a jury decide, or a psychiatrist.

People said Jeffrey Dahmer had to be insane to capture and cannibalize his victims like he did, but I disagree. He did it in secrecy. He hid the body parts. He knew what he was doing was wrong. Same with Charles Manson. Definitely something wrong there, I won’t argue that, but he knew very well it was wrong to slaughter innocent people, even if he did have his faithful followers do his dirty work for him. He is a great actor with a severe personality disorder but he is not insane.

You hear all sorts of reasons for murder when you work in a jail, some of them are infinitely creative. It’s usually due to misplaced passion or a drug deal gone wrong. Only the names and faces change. But now and then a really interesting and creative excuse for killing another person materializes. I recall one old man who shot and killed his ex-wife and her new boyfriend because she refused to show him how to make doughnuts. She had promised him she would come over to his house and help him make a batch of doughnuts and instead she chose to spend the afternoon with her new beau. The old man simply lost it, drove over to his ex-wife’s trailer and blew her and her new guy away. Then he went and had a drink.

I can’t say he really tried to hide the crime. He knew he was in deep trouble and he tried a few feeble excuses at first, but the whole crime was solved very quickly, the same day, in fact. He may have been momentarily insane with anger or jealousy but as I recall, he did get sent to prison, so evidently the jury did not buy it. That’s probably because he had the foresight to load his rifle and drive to her trailer to commit the crime. It was seen as premeditation, or The Failed Doughnut Defense.