Doin' Time

...and gone!

2009-10-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

It took me a little while to convince Larry that I had no intention of putting him back into his former cell. He was definitely terrified. Once satisfied I was not there to send him into the swirling vortex of terror, he calmed again and shook his head hard, like a possessed bobble-head doll. “It was real crazy, I tell you! You can ask anybody that was back there-they all seen somethin’ at least once! Or heard somethin’, or somethin’!”

I decided it was time to cease my inquiry. I had heard enough “somethin’s” and I was fearful Larry’s head might begin to spin around and spew pea soup. The only thing left for me was to investigate our Ghost on my own, in person, mano a mano, so to speak. I took it upon myself to begin doing the nighttime security walks in Dorm One myself.

Walking about in a dark jail, with nothing but a flashlight for company, has a spook-value of about 85 to begin with. When you add the tale of a wandering ghost, plus all the unusual sounds that drift out from the cells (don’t ask) it can be a pretty intimidating thing for anyone to do. I don’t know of any officer who enjoys doing nighttime walkabouts, but they are necessary to try and keep safety and security in the jail situation.

They can be dangerous, too, but not from the inmates point of view. I was on a late night walk-about one night when one of our rather “playful” deputies decided to sneak up behind me and give me a good, old-fashioned scare. I do not recommend this, if anyone out there has ever had such an inclination. This playful deputy crept up behind me in a dark corridor behind the cells and blew on the back of my neck. I suppose he forgot that I had had self-defense training, just like everyone else. The large, black metal flashlight in my hand became an instantaneous weapon and without giving a thought to anything but my own safety, I cold-cocked our playful deputy.

I did not, for one moment, believe that a metal flashlight would be of much use against a ghost, however. I thought about carrying a wooden stake or a clump of garlic, but it occurred to me that those were for protection against of vampires. The metal cross around my neck was always a handy weapon, as well, but only if your attacker was a werewolf. Try as I might, I could not recall any method of protection from ghosts. Maybe a few Hail Mary’s? Nope, I was not Catholic. It seemed I was on my own.

For the first few nights, in fact the first week of my self-imposed nighttime walk-abouts, I really didn’t see or hear (or smell) anything out of the ordinary. Inmates snored and mumbled and thrashed in their sleep, not to mention the occasional dispelling of noxious gasses from the evening’s fare of beans and franks. I wondered why any ghost would want to wander around in such an atmosphere? Why not the lovely, old hotel across the street? Or one of the beautiful, old renovated homes that served as Funeral parlors on the next block? No accounting for taste, I suppose.

It was while I was wondering this and turning the corner in the far back section of the corridor that I felt the cold. I can best describe it as the first gush of cold air one feels when you pull open a refrigerator door. It was a dry, sharp, odorless chill that sort of swept around me and then dissipated, all in the period of approximately ten seconds. Like a window coming open on a February night, except that none of the small, barred window along the top of the corridor walls could be physically opened.

I stopped and waved my flashlight. Nothing. No sound at all, in fact I could not even hear the inmates snoring and flatulating, but that may have been due to the loud hammering of my heartbeat in my ears.

I finally began to walk again, taking baby steps so as not to stir up the chill factor again, but I did not hear or see or feel anything else until I rounded the end of the back corridor and started along the western wall. As I walked, flashlight shaking, I began to be attacked. It wasn’t really much of an onslaught, but it scared the bejeezus out of me! Every time I passed a cell window, whatever was on that sill flew off and hit the cement floor with a crash! Feet, don’t fail me now!

It is about fifty feet from where I stood to the exit out of that cellblock and I made it in record time, all the while being followed by the sound of various articles flying off the cell windowsills to the floor.

I burst out of the heavy cellblock door into the light of the main floor area with my hair standing on end, or so it seemed to me. The three other people on duty that night must have thought I was being chased by tigers, or worse, and since they are blessed with warped senses of humor, I was met with a barrage of snide remarks and quips that suggested I was losing my mind.

“Maybe so,” I recall saying in between my gasps for breath, “But something in there has a bad case of icy breath and chased me all the way out and knocked all the crap off the inmate’s cell windows!”

I must admit, they did end up giving me a chance to explain but the looks they shared with one another told me they were ready to call for a straightjacket. Still, the sergeant on duty decided it was only fair to give me the benefit of the doubt and go see what I was talking about.

We crept back into the cellblock-well, I crept, and he just walked quietly. Inside, it was dimly lit, as always, and the sounds, smells, and air temperature was nothing out of the ordinary. Well, okay, my ghost had decided to stop the refrigerator routine, but I had the strewn articles from the cell windowsills as proof.

Except that when I took the sergeant around to the western corridor to show him the remnants of my ghostly attack, there was nothing to show. All the pencils, soap boxes, drinking cups, photographs and the rest of the inmate treasures were sitting neatly in place on their windowsills, right where they had been before Casper decided to play a game of Scare The Deputy. Nothing scattered on the cement floors, nothing out of place, nothing to prove my sanity at all, and the whole dorm full of inmates continued to sleep, snore, mumble and fart without the slightest notion of what had just occurred.

Detention Officers are a polite bunch, all in all. No one ever mentioned that little episode to me again. Oh, I’m very sure they all talked about it among themselves and had a few wonderful chuckles, but they were tactful enough not to call our local mental health center or to alert the media. After a while the pitiful stares eased up, too, especially when several other inmates, over time, spoke in whispered tones about the Ghost.

I’m pretty sure William stuck up for me. He had witnessed Casper, after all, and he assured me that other officers had had connections with our friend, also. They were probably just too wise, or embarrassed, to admit to it. No problem. I know what I saw and felt that night and no one will ever convince me otherwise. I think my only regret is that Casper is still there in the jail, as far as I know. The elevator still rises and opens every night and the inmates in Dorm One still occasionally report strange happenings. I doubt our Ghost is dangerous. On the contrary, I think he is very sad and frustrated. I wish there was a way to help him out, to allow him to move on and locate someplace more pleasant to spend his time. I know I would not want to spend my eternity in the Yavapai County Jail.

...and goes....

2009-10-15T14:14:00.000-07:00

Let me preface this with a little explanation about William. He was initially from England and had several first names to go with his illustrious sir-name, but he was simply “William” to all of us. He had been in the States since he was quite young but never lost his British accent, and as far as I could gather he had worked for the Yavapai County jail for almost ever. He was one of those unforgettable folks who fall into the “Character” category.

William was pompous, temperamental, stubborn, opinionated and completely loveable. He had fire engine red hair, right down to his walrus moustache and freckles. He loved jokes about the Queen Mum and had a wicked sense of British humor. I recall one night quite well when the newly elected Governor of our state came to the door of the jail looking to speak with our Sheriff and William happened to be the one in the control cage, and thus in charge of who came in and went out.

Ordinarily the Governor would not be entering the building by way of the jail but it was after hours and the rest of the building was locked up. There was no way to reach the inner sanctum of the Sheriff’s Office but through locked doors. So when William heard the buzz he answered the intercom in his usual, properly British way:

“May I help you?”

The woman’s voice replied, “I’m here to see the Sheriff.”

“And who are you, Madam?”

“This is the Governor.”

William should have recognized her voice, perhaps, but through a speaker that’s very difficult. Plus, who knew what our new Governor sounded like? And there were no cameras at the rear door back then. William remained polite and calm, “Is the Sheriff expecting you, Madam?”

“I have an appointment.”

“And you are...?”

A quick sigh, “This is Governor Miller! The Sheriff is expecting me!”

“I’ll have to check with him, Madam. Do you have any identification?”

Apparently Governor Miller was not used to being told she must identify herself, especially at night, in back of a jail, by some English voice over an intercom. “I told you, I am Governor Miller! Now will you please let me in?”

“I’m sorry, madam, but I cannot allow you in without proper identification. If you’ll just be seated on the bench there, I’ll have a deputy come out and check your identification.”

Things went downhill fast at that point and our esteemed Governor began to let William know just how she felt about her situation and our lack if response to her authority. It was at that point that William, in his calm, lilting, British accent said to her: “Now, now, Ducks, don’t get your knickers in a twist!”

The Governor was instantly quiet. I suppose she had no clue what to say. Certainly she had never been told to keep her knickers untwisted before and it is doubtful she ever was told again. You had to know William to appreciate the scenario.

And thus, when I went to William to inquire about the Ghost, I expected a droll barrage of British sarcasm or humor. I was fairly sure I was being duped and that William would jovially tell me just that. Instead, I got a wide-eyed, completely serious expression of sincerity.
“Oh, yes! He’s been carousing about the jail for some time now. Ever since that boy hung himself in the holding cell.”

I kept waiting for the twinkle in William’s eye to appear, letting me know he was in on the joke, but twinkle it did not. I probably offered him a frown, I sure felt like frowning, “So, you’re telling me that you’ve seen him?”

“I have, indeed,” William nodded. “Twice, actually!”

“Where?”

“Back in Dorm One.”

My apprehension was dwindling a bit, “Does he moan or drag chains or what?”

William chuckled at that, in only the way William is able; sort of a pompous, British chuckle that makes everyone else want to chuckle along with him. “No, no. He just sort of floats along, looking into the cells, you know. He’s a curious sort, I suppose.”

Casper the Curious Ghost.

It’s hard to keep William on any one subject for very long because he always has a plethora of things to tell you, and it was no different with the subject of our resident ghost. I wanted more information but William had much more important things on his mind, all of which escape me at this point. I went no further with the paranormal investigation that night.
It was about a week, maybe two weeks later that I experienced “Casper” myself. I had casually interrogated a couple of the inmates in Dorm One just to see if any of them would squeal about their privacy being invaded by a ghost, but no one did. They did tell me they had heard about him and then one of the guys mentioned that his pal Larry could fill me in. Larry had seen the ghost (and Larry had been moved out of Dorm One into a different area at his own request.)

I found the enigmatic Larry in Dorm Three and after we chit-chatted a while about the quality of jail food and the available TV programming, I brought up the subject of Casper the Curious Ghost. That was when Larry’s face went kind of ashen.

“Yeah, I seen it!” Larry replied with a stiffness that suggested he was either suddenly frightened or had to use the bathroom. “It was like this fog, y’know? I seen it twice, it kinda come glidin’ along the back by my cell, and it got real cold when it went by.”
Very Gothic, I thought to myself.

“Was it an actual figure? I mean, a boy or a girl or something like that?”

“It was a guy.”

“How did you tell?”

Larry shrugged, “I dunno. It just seemed like a guy. It was a blue, foggy-like blob thing and it moved by and it stopped and sorta looked into my cell. Gave me the creeps, y’know? And I ain’t a scared of anythin’!”

“Did it make any sound?”

“Naah.” Larry shook his head and then hesitated as his brows knitted in thought, “But it knocked the stuff off my cell window.”

There is a walkway around each cellblock dorm and each cell has a barred window through which officers can look in and keep track of the inhabitant’s activities. The inmates often store little things along these cell windowsills, such as toothpaste or combs or the little soapboxes they use to keep their pencils and other small tidbits. It would not be difficult to knock something from that sill but it would have to be done purposefully. There is not enough air movement back in the dorms to cause anything to fall without human assistance.

“And you’re pretty sure it was the ghost, huh?” I inquired with suspicion.

Larry gave me a wide-eyed stare, “I damn-well know it was him! I don’t care what anybody else says, I seen it and I felt it get cold, and I ain’t goin’ back in there either! No sir, ma’am! You ain’t gettin’ me back in that damned place!”

...and the story goes...

2009-10-15T14:10:00.000-07:00

The story I heard was that a young Native American boy (he had to have been at least 18 to be in the jail) had hung himself from the light fixture in the holding cell by the booking desk. Some of the officers later said he had been Hispanic, others said it was a female, so the facts around who this ghost had been were somewhat iffy. Most stayed with the Native American theory so I have always leaned towards that myself.

I never saw The Ghost. I will put that on the table right away. But I did see some very strange things occur during graveyard shifts and there were several inmates and one officer who claimed they had seen him, cruising around in Dorm One, which at the time held our more dangerous offenders.

My first inkling that someone or something of a paranormal type was malingering in the jail was the elevator. It was a common, run-of-the-mill elevator that led from the booking entry area to the second floor jail. It went nowhere else, not down into any sort of basement and not up to the third floor offices. It was a two-floor elevator, up and down, main floor to second floor, period. The only thing slightly exceptional about it was the constant lingering aroma of, well, it’s hard to say. Just jail.

It took me about three weeks before I realized something rather unusual about the way the elevator performed, or acted, or worked. I’m a little slow sometimes, I suppose, when it comes to catching extraordinary events. Every night, somewhere between two and two fifteen a.m., the elevator would lift up to the jail floor and the door would open, but there was never anyone inside.

It did not strike me as odd until I began working in the Central Control cage. This area is a small, caged rectangle of telephones, TV monitors, buttons and switches where the officer assigned spends his or her shift watching TV monitors to keep an eye on inmates and letting people in and out of the jail through security-locked doors. If one is claustrophobic, it’s not the most pleasant place to be. It is also right in sight of the elevator door. Anyone going down from the jail via the elevator has to pass right by the control cage, and in order for someone to get into the elevator downstairs they would have to come through the locked booking door which can only be opened by the officer in Central Control (yours truly). Plus there are cameras everywhere; it’s a security thing. No one enters or exits the jail without the officer in Central Control letting them.

The night I first noticed the odd elevator behavior I was in Central Control by myself and was puzzled by the elevator door opening when I had not allowed anyone in through the booking door. Nor had anyone gone out of the booking door, at least not in the previous ten minutes. I thought about it briefly but when no one else commented and nothing else extraordinary happened, I filed it under “forget-about-it” and went on with my duties.

It took about four nights of the same empty-elevator activity before it struck me that something odd was at hand. I told you, I am slow at some things. When I finally got the courage to ask one of the other officers, he just shrugged and said, “Ah, that’s just The Ghost.”

Ghost? Really? Now my interest was immediately peaked. “What ghost?”

The officer, named Gary, explained to me that the jail ghost was that of a “kid” who hung himself in the holding cell one night and that Gary, himself, has been the one to find the body and cut it down.

“It happened so damned fast!” Gary explained, shaking his head, “He was pretty drunk and upset,you know how they get sometimes. We were watching him but it was busy that night and we can’t keep an eye on everybody for twenty-four hours a day, y’know?”

I did know. But only someone who spent any time actually working in a jail could really comprehend just how busy and stressful the job of a detention or corrections officer truly is. In 99 percent of all cases, inmates in jails and prisons are treated well, their needs are met and their problems are handled, but it’s a world of over-crowding, deceit and manipulation and sometimes things just happen. Like a drunken Native-American boy hanging himself in the five minutes the officers were not looking. Gary was a good officer. He was known for avoiding work at times by being constantly “on a mission”, but when he was there he was responsible. I knew if anyone had been keeping an eye on the young man in the holding cell, it would have been Gary.

Suicides are not taken lightly in the Yavapai County Jails. Whenever an inmate states that he or she is suicidal they are instantly put on a suicide watch. In fact, if an inmate even breaths a word that might suggest suicidal ideations are present, precautions are taken. Only a qualified psychiatrist can take an inmate off a suicide watch, no matter how much they beg and plead and tell the officers that they were “just kidding”.

According to Gary, the young inmate was not on a suicide watch at all. He had given no sign of being suicidal, he was simply very drunk and very angry and very embarrassed at being in jail. None of those things are unusual or indicative of someone who is planning to kill himself. Unfortunately, in this case, the young inmate must have acted on impulse.

“So,why do you think he’s the ghost?” was my next question.

Gary shrugged, “Well, he died somewhere between two and two fifteen in the morning, and the strange stuff started happening the next night.”

“Strange stuff?”

“Yeah, like the elevator coming up and the door opening, and the stuff they see in Dorm One.”

I had not heard about any “stuff” in Dorm One, but I hadn’t been there too long and there was a lot of “stuff” I had not yet heard about. Still, that was not what I asked about. Instead, I asked, “Why would he haunt Dorn One if he died in the holding cell”

Gary shrugged again, “I don’t know. We figure it’s because it’s the closest cell block and it’s also kinda separated from the others, y’know? Spooky.”

Yes, that was a fact. Dorm One could be very spooky at two in the morning. Most of the jail was. “So,what kinds of things happen back there?”

“Mostly the vision.”

“Vision?”

By then, Gary was getting impatient as he had reports to run as part of his shift duties. “You oughta go ask William,” he said. “He’s seen it,The Ghost, I mean.”

Gary then left me there as he went off to complete his mission, and I found myself anxiously waiting to speak with William about our ghost....

The Ghost & I

2009-10-13T13:11:00.000-07:00

I love anything paranormal. That is not to say I believe in everything reported as being paranormal but I would like to. I’ve had a few experiences of my own which some might chalk up to coincidence, but I don’t believe in coincidences and never have. There are just some things that happen which have no explanations, such as the banana that fell from the sky on my windshield one morning.

I never should have spoken of it at work. I had so many people laughing, I thought the building might collapse, but the truth is, I really did have a banana fall from the sky and splat on the windshield of my car. I was driving along, early in the morning, minding my own business on my way to work, there was no one on the road either ahead of or behind me, my radio was playing something country-western, and just like that - splat! A banana landed in front of my face and exploded across the windshield like some alien goop. Actually that could very well be the answer: aliens. It could have been litter from some high-flying spacecraft. There is no reason to think aliens wouldn’t enjoy an occasional banana.

I have read every Stephen King and Dean Koontz novel to date and I am a great fan of certain psychics and most things dealing with the afterlife. I also suppose that somewhere, way out in that infinite void of outer space there are most certainly other forms of life. It would be terribly vain of us to believe we are the only thinking beings in that vast, endless whatever-it-is. I can only hope that wherever and whoever they are, they have more common sense than those of us on planet Earth. So, if I were put to the point I would have to say that I do, sort of, believe in aliens.

I draw the line at UFO’s, however. Here is my theory: wouldn’t you think that if a life form that was smart enough to span eons of time and space to cruise around over our earth, spying on us or gathering information by sucking us up into their spaceships and giving us rectal probes, they would have the brains to leave the lights off on their space ships? Come on now. If I were sneaking around in someone else’s neighborhood, I would not be dumb enough to leave all my cars lights on! It just doesn’t make sense. So if any extraterrestrials are reading this, tell your next group of space traveling aliens to turn off the lights on their ships so as not to get our UFO watchers all riled up again!

With this in mind, I must comment on the night my son and daughter announced to me that they had seen a UFO floating over Big Bear Valley. This was something my tarantula-loving son, Kris, might dream up to catch my attention, but for my sensible, grounded daughter, Wendy, it seemed a bit out of character.

And yet there they were, standing side by side at the top of the living room stairs telling me about the UFO they witnessed just a little while before. Colored lights, they said, moving around some big, dark thing that was floating over the mountains and then it just lifted up and sort of vanished.

I kept waiting for one of them to crack and start laughing, but neither did. They kept staring at me with their big, blue, innocent eyes as wide and honest as could be imagined.

“Really, Mom!” Kris insisted, while Wendy kept nodding frantically.

“A UFO,” I stated, not wanting to urge them on.

“Well, it was something!” Kris protested. He always got extremely frustrated when he was telling me the truth and I was not buying it. The problem was, Kris was so good at fabricating life in general that I was always in a state of suspicion. Wendy, however, was a different story.

Not that she never fibbed, because she did, but she was just not very good at it. I could spot her in a lie from a mile away. Her forehead would crinkle and her eyes would dart around the room in every direction but at me. I would almost feel sorry for her - but not quite. Which was why I found myself teetering on the brink of belief in the UFO that night. Wendy was not exhibiting the Fib-Posture, which meant she had certainly witnessed something, or honestly believed she had. It was a puzzlement.

I went out onto our porch and scanned the dark sky but saw nothing except for stars and an occasional high-flying airplane light. Kris was too exasperated to be patient with me,
“Geeeze, Mom, we told you it vanished! It’s not still up there, for cripe sake!”

Wendy pointed to the northeast, “It went that way, Mom,” she assured me. There was a note of nervousness in her voice, another sure sign of honesty. But a UFO? Over Big Bear?

I did my best to be patient without humoring them too much. Obviously my two children had been smoking their dirty socks again. I didn’t want to intensify their hallucination by offering them any suggestions or answers so I let it drop, hoping that by morning their excitement, and the story that went with it, would fade.

As things sometimes go, my hopes were realized and both Wendy and Kristopher went off to school the following morning with no further mention of the UFO. As far as I could ascertain, neither of them had been taken up into a spaceship during the night, there were no signs of probes or biopsies, and they were acting relatively normal. I use the term “normal” with caution because two pre-teens are rarely normal. They fight, squabble, argue, fuss and fume, and that is all very normal, so I guess the following morning was as normal as ever.

When I got to work, however, I had about a dozen people ask me if I had seen “The Lights” last night? The Lights?

At this point in my life I was working at the local newspaper and aside from the reporters, who are prone to fantasy in any news-media setting, the people I work with there were very stable, intelligent folk. If they were mentioning The Lights, I began to think maybe my two offspring had not been hallucinating after all. It gave me a glimmer of hope.

“Lights? Really?” I asked naively.

Janie was one of the advertising folks at the newspaper. She gave me a wink and rolled her eyes, as if to say, “Don’t get hooked!” but Janie was hard to convince of anything so I shifted my attention to one of the long-time office people, Stan. He was quick to oblige.

“Yeah,lights over the lake. They disappeared over Sugarloaf. Some people are saying it was a UFO.”

I asked Stan if he had seen them?

“Yup, sure did. Looked like a big cigar with Christmas lights hangin’ on the sides.” Stan replied as he lit the bowl of one of his pipes. (He spent 90 percent of his time lighting his pipes and only about 10 percent actually smoking them.)

“Do you think it was a UFO?” I asked.

Stan laughed out loud at that, “What the Hell would a UFO be doing over Big Bear Lake? No aliens could ever be that bored!”

From there on out the conversation turned into a smuddle of voices sharing their opinions on the subject, but I was lost in my own thoughts. Stan had a point. Why would someone who had just traveled a gazillion light years to check out Earth spend any of their time cruising over Big Bear Lake? There was nothing of any interest to be found there, no secret military bases or weapons of mass destruction and no one in Big Bear had ever done anything worth alien inspection, except maybe Hawaiian Frank. And then we get back to my previous point of thought on the subject of UFO’s. What’s with the shining, colored lights? Colored lights and stealth do not go together

The mystery was never solved but it did catch my attention and I was willing to accept the possibility. That’s me: open-minded to the end! And so, years later when I was working in the jail and someone told me about the jail Ghost, I was willing to learn all about it...

phlegm and coffee do not mix...

2009-10-10T16:25:00.000-07:00

To put it simply, Ruby was a “true character”. I have not seen her in twelve years but I cannot walk into the jail kitchen even today without a brief, fleeting thought of her flitting through my head. She was a cartoon character unto herself, from head to toe and everywhere in between.

To begin with, I never knew what the true color of Ruby’s hair was but I assume, by her age, it was probably gray. She dyed it brown, however. I cannot say exactly was shade of brown it was because it changed weekly, but it was somewhere in the vicinity between raven and southwestern red dirt. The problem was that she had very little of it and so she wore a hair-like creation on top of her head to give added height and volume where Nature failed. I know no better term that “creation”. It was not what one would call a chignon, although it may have started out that way in the beginning, nor was it a wig nor a toupee nor a “fall” as we referred to them in the Sixties. Actually, it was more like a dead cat.

Somewhere along the line, Ruby had begun ratting and styling this glob of hair herself. Notice I did not say she began washing it, because I doubt the thing had ever seen shampoo or water in its entire life. It was roughly the size and shape of a five-pound coffee can and the color had once been a rather attractive chestnut hue. By the time I met Ruby, however, years of dirt and hairspray had taken its toll and the radiant chestnut was now more of a dead grasshopper tan. It in no way and at no time ever matched the ever-changing color of her natural hair. Neither did the enormous hairpins she used to fasten it to her skull. When Ruby got to walking in her slightly lopsided gate, that glob of hair would begin to bobble and sway in rhythm and everyone in her path would watch in horror as they waited for it to catapult from her head and bounce off the jail walls like a berserk bowling ball. Amazingly, it never quite did that.

Ruby’s face reminded me of pieces of putty that had been arbitrarily assembled at the whim of some pranksters. Nothing really matched and yet everything went together, from her squinty eyes with their heavy, overhung lids, past her replica of WC Fields’ nose and on down to her malleable, bee-stung-red lips that were always wrapped around the soggy end of an unfiltered cigarette. I could not carry on a conversation with Ruby without watching her lips move around that cigarette. They adjusted and readjusted like two slugs doing a sort of primitive dance as they did their best to form words without losing the grip on her smoke.
Not long after I came to work in the jail, the County passed a rule that there would be no smoking in the jail at all: not the inmates and not the staff. This was actually a blessing, coming from someone who has never smoked, because there is almost no ventilation in the enclosed world of a jail and at times the secondhand smoke got really unbearable. This is another digression on my part, however.

Ruby smoked like a tenement chimney and before the rule banning cigarettes in the jail was initiated, she used to hang out in the break room with the officers for a smoke whenever she could venture away from the kitchen. I have often wondered if Ruby was finally pressed into retirement by the loss of her smoking privileges. I have no proof of this but I have always been suspicious.

At any rate, the break room was the place where the blue-gray haze hung thickest and where Ruby would sit and exhale her smoke. Along with that she exhibited the typical hacking cough of any long time smoker. When Ruby got to coughing it sounded like the floodgates of Hoover Dam were about to burst. She would inhale in a long, slow, quaking gasp, hold it for a second, and then exhale in a nerve-shattering explosion, which sent everyone in the vicinity diving for cover. One never knew what would accompany that cough from the depths of Ruby’s lungs. It had once resulted in her false teeth rocketing across the kitchen landing in the pancake batter that was subsequently served for the jail breakfast.

Then came the evening shift when several of us were sitting in the break room after dinner and Ruby wandered in to join us. I was not a smoker but if I wanted any company at meals I had to sit with the rest of the officers in the break room. That evening I was there with one of the nurses, two floor officers and Sarge. Ruby took a seat in a chair across the table from Sarge and let out a sigh that suggested she had been working for seventy-two hours straight.
I don’t know what started her hacking, there was never any warning when Ruby was seized with a coughing fit, they just erupted. That evening the five of us had been involved in a very nice conversation, as I recall, enjoying some after-dinner coffee, when the first stage hit: the rolling, gasping inhalation:
Dive! Dive!

But it was too late. All eyes turned towards Ruby as her hair glob started bobbing back and forth while the gurgling cough erupted its way up and out into the open. We gripped the edge of the table and set our jaws, our toes curling in our shoes while we waited for the inevitable. Everyone wondered who would be the brave person who might come to Ruby’s rescue if she ever stopped breathing from her agonized horking, and that evening it appeared that just might be necessary. Ruby’s face turned purple, her eyes watered, the cigarette slipped from her red, puffy lips, and with one final, liquid burst of air, she spewed a missile of phlegm across the table and directly into Sarge’s coffee.

I have known Sarge for nearly fifteen years and this was the one and only time I ever saw him struck mute. It was as if he could not believe what he had seen. Five pairs of eyes stared at the ripples in his mug as the glob sunk briefly to the bottom and then drifted back to the surface of the coffee, bobbing there like a small, greenish-gray log-jam.

The nurse and one of the officers, who were near the doorway, fled the room, gagging. The other officer and I both scrambled backwards to the end of the table, trying to contain our own dinners. Sarge, who was a Vietnam veteran and had seen just about everything there is to see, just sat and stared, speechless, at his desecrated coffee. What could he say, after all?
Ruby picked up her cigarette and stuck it back between her rubbery lips, totally unaware of what had just occurred. “Somebody fart?” she asked nonchalantly.

Sarge blinked and frowned, “What?”

Ruby shrugged, “Ever’body just jumped like a pack of rabbits. I figured somebody musta farted to clear a room like that.”

Sarge gave me one of his don’t say a word! looks, so I didn’t. Ruby finished her cigarette, coughed and horked a few more times and then made her way back into the kitchen to finish whatever she was involved in before she had decided to take a smoke break.

Ruby’s title of true “character” was not limited to her lungs and hairstyle, however. Somewhere along the line she had developed a real problem with her bathroom abilities, or I should say, lack of them.

There are certain things a mother teaches her daughter when it comes to using a public, or semiprivate bathroom. Among them is to always use a seat protector (when available) or at least to cover the seat with bits of toilet paper to avoid contact, and if neither of these is a viable option, one should bend at the knees and sort of hover over the seat - again in the attempt to stop contact contamination. In retrospect, this had to have been what Ruby attempted to do. There could be no other explanation as to why she had so much trouble hitting the target, which is normally not that difficult for a female to accomplish. It’s not like we stand in front of the bowl and aim like a man. For a woman to miss her target takes a good deal of effort, but Ruby was the Queen of Bathroom Disasters.

No one would even follow her into the ladies room if she were seen exiting. You never knew what you would find, but you always knew it would be unpleasant. And it didn’t stop when she exited the room, either. More than once Ruby made her way back to the kitchen with her smock top tucked into her pantyhose or a streamer of toilet paper trailing along from her pant leg. We won’t even get into the supposed “coffee stains” on the back of her pants.

I find myself, even now, wondering if Ruby knew how her fellow employees, and even the inmate workers, made fun of her. I was guilty myself, at times, because every so often, such as in the case of Sarge’s coffee, the event was so funny even in spite of the gross-out issues that surrounded it, you could not help but laugh hysterically. It was not Ruby we laughed at, it was the Character within her. Beneath her bumbling and often disgusting ways dwelt a very good heart. The hard shell of red lipstick and cigarette stains disguised a kind soul who had raised her abandoned grandchildren and cared for her disabled husband with never a complaint. She grouched and grumbled about the jail in her coarse, nicotine-ravaged voice, but I never heard her say a bad word about any person. She was so unassuming and unobtrusive that I sometimes believe if she had not been such a Character, Ruby might have been almost invisible.

That might be said of all the Characters in the world. We all need to be remembered by someone for something, and if we don’t have the physical appearance or the Wall Street ingenuity to make ourselves memorable, we might just have to invent our own personal Character.

"Ruby" (Or the dangers of eating in a jail kicthens and other misadventures of a jail cook)

2009-10-10T16:18:00.000-07:00

It is the people who are often referred to as “characters” that seem to be the ones we remember most in our lives. It isn’t the most beautiful or handsome ones. It isn’t the cleverest or the most intelligent or the wealthiest. No, it doesn’t seem to matter what other traits a person may have, if he or she is a real “character” they seem to end up being remembered by those people who have the fortune or misfortune to cross their lives’ path.

I had a neighbor once, some years ago, who happened to be the owner of the local radio station. In most ways he was a fairly normal, middle-aged man who enjoyed playing elevator-type music and a bit of country out over the airwaves of Big Bear Valley, where I called home. For purposes of this writing, we’ll call him Frank.

Frank loved Hawaiian music, Hawaiian food, Hawaiian shirts, just about anything Hawaiian, and so, once a day, every day, for one hour in the afternoon, Frank would play Hawaiian music over his radio station’s airwaves. He owned the station, he was the boss, so who was there to stop him? Don Ho, Hula Hattie, the Kamioke Brothers, the list of singers was long and distinguished. Most people enjoy a bit of Hawaiian music now and then and the choices Frank made to air on his radio station were excellent selections. That was not the problem. The problem came in because Frank always sang along.

There is a time and a place for singing duets with the radio. I’m famous for doing just that. Over the years I have sung some really fine harmony with John Denver, Neil Diamond and even the Kingston Trio while buzzing along in my car. I’ve never received a penny in wages for this, even though my rendition of Rocky Mountain High exceeds that of any highway singer known today. I am even very good at humming in the places where the words escape me, or taking the plunge and making up lyrics of my own. But this was where Frank ran into trouble.
Had he confined his vocalizations to times when he was alone in his car, no one would have cared. He could have sung in any key and made up all the Hawaiian words he wanted and it would have gone unnoticed. But Frank did not do that. Frank sang right along with the music from his little studio office, live, over the airwaves, at the very top of his lungs. Whether or not he knew the words did not matter to Frank. Who understood Hawaiian anyway? And the fact that he could not carry a tune in a bucket was no deterrent to Frank either.

It got so that people in the Valley would tune into the little radio station at three o’clock every afternoon just to hear Frank singing along with his Hawaiian talent line-up. It soon became not so much an annoyance as it did a comical interlude to the day. Frank was a “character”: one of those people that other people laugh at and chuckle about but inevitably remember just about forever. I have not heard Frank sing along with Don Ho for almost 20 years now but I cannot hear an Hawaiian song without thinking briefly about Frank’s off-key baritone coming across my car radio in sync with the song he was playing. That’s what “Characters” do. They stick in your memory, good or bad, and turn up throughout your life at the oddest places.

Our resident Character, Ruby, the jail cook, had come with the building, or so it was said. Initially the Federal Government had constructed the building that now is home to the Yavapai County jail in Prescott, and when they no longer needed the use of the facility they turned it over to the county for a jail. Ruby had been hired by the Feds to run their jail kitchen and so when the county inherited the building, they also inherited Ruby...

2009-10-09T19:57:00.000-07:00

The moral of this tale is to present some insight into my love of and for animals and just how forgiving I can be, even when the critter is creepy, fuzzy, has eight legs and hates me. With this in resume, it is no wonder I stopped on my way into work one Valentine’s Day eve to investigate the squeaking and whimpering sounds I heard in the night.

I was pulling a graveyard shift that night and arrived at the jail at about eleven p.m. It had started to snow that afternoon and by the time I got to work it was blowing a pretty fair-sized blizzard for this part of the state. Still, it was very quiet and peaceful as I trudged through the yet un-plowed snow towards the rear of the jail to let myself in, and in the silence I could hear the distinct sounds of something small making pitiful sounds in the cold night.

I traced the sounds to a patrol car, which had been parked in its current spot for some time, considering the buildup of snow on it, and I got down on all fours to venture a look underneath. What I found there was a pile of assorted colors of fur, not really distinguishable in the dark. I managed to pull the lump of fur out into the light of the parking area and found a small, white, female poodle and five brownish colored pups.

The mother was a mat of mud, grease and tangles beyond recognition. She was also dead, either from having had the litter, from the cold or from starvation. Most likely it was a combination of the three causes. Two of her pups were also frozen and lifeless, but three of them seemed to be hanging onto life, like tiny, fuzzy balls of snow packed fluff. They must have had an incredible will to live as they could not have been more than an hour or so old.
The mother dog was wearing a frayed, filthy red collar but there were no identifying tags. I had one of the trusties come down with a plastic bag and wrap up mama dog and her two lifeless pups for a later burial while I carried the three remaining puppies inside and up to the jail.

I have no idea what the precise policy is for having puppies in the jail. At that time, some years ago, the only animals you might find there, besides the inmates and a few of the officers, were the drug and patrol dogs that were brought in to visit when their services were needed, or when their officer wanted to take a break and made a late night visit to the jail for a cup of hot, strong, jailhouse coffee. Otherwise, I do not believe animals were allowed. I’m not sure why.

So, officer Quayle to the rescue. I had three tiny, half frozen puppies in my jacket and the utter determination to make sure someone, somehow, helped keep them alive. The shift sergeant made it clear to me she wanted nothing to do with any of it, but if they happened to disappear into the depths of the Trusty dorm and were too quiet to be heard, what could she do about it?

For the following five weeks, those three puppies were hand fed and cared for by a dorm full of inmates. It would have made an incredible human interest story for any publication: a dozen big, tattooed, inmates caring for pups that weighed about as much as half a stick of butter, or less, bottle feeding them formula, first with eyedroppers and then with rubber kitchen gloves for nipples. The duties were shared equally, with each inmate taking his turn to miss sleep and feed his puppy. They were kept spotlessly clean and amazingly quiet and every one of the three, two males and one female, survived. There is possibly no image more heartwarming than seeing big, burly, tattooed men holding tiny balls of fluff in their hands and feeding them drop by drop.

But the media, and more importantly the Sheriff, never knew. Or, if the Sheriff did know he turned his head the other way and no mention was ever made of it. When the puppies were five weeks old they were put up for adoption to the officers. Well, the two males were. I took the female.

She became “The Mighty Face”; “Face” for short, and as I began to write this she was nearly fifteen years old and still going strong. Her fluffy, brown fur mutated to a rather mouse-color over the years, probably because her daddy was a wanderer of dubious breeding and Face’s genetic background is iffy, at best. Over time her tiny body widened so that she somewhat resembled a furry football, but she was still “Face”, the Jailhouse Dog.

Face and I went through a lot of times together, good and bad, including the death of my son, Kris, but she never left my side. I tried to always be there for her, as well. She had an incredible will to live that snowy night many years ago and it seemed the least I could do was to honor her love of life with a loving home, a full bowl of food and a warm spot on my bed at night. So I did that until a time nearing her 17th birthday when she slipped away in my arms. Face is buried under a boulder in my front yard where hollyhocks and morning glories bloom all summer long. I’m pretty sure she likes that.

"The Ballad of Face"

2009-10-09T12:58:00.000-07:00

I have always had a very soft spot in my heart and soul for animals of every sort. That even includes reptiles, which I realize are not everyone’s favorite critters. Snakes, frogs, lizards, I love them all. I can even tolerate a few insects, although I have to admit I draw the line at a few of the native Arizona crawlies that choose to take up residence in my house. The tarantula I call Gomer that lives under my hay shed is fine, he keeps his distance and never jumps at me. He and the King Snake (Otis), who also inhabits the warm hay shed, seem to get along okay and pose no threat to my safety or sanity.

I have not always enjoyed the company of tarantulas, however. When my son, Kris, was about ten he had a pet tarantula he called Ziggy. Ziggy inhabited an aquarium in my son’s bedroom and feasted on the crickets and moths he was fed on a daily basis, which kept Kris busy for at least twenty or thirty minutes a day, all the less time for him to get into some sort of mischief.

Ziggy hated me. No, I mean he really, truly hated me. I got along just fine with Kris’s Guinea Pigs and the Ball Python named Monty. I even fared well with the mice Kris raised to feed Monty, although it only took less that three months for two mice to turn into a seething mass of about forty mice. Monty just could not eat them fast enough to keep the burgeoning population from taking over the cage so we donated quite a few to the local zoo. I wish I could have donated Ziggy!

There are people who will tell you that a tarantula doesn’t have the capacity to hate someone, but I would argue that point. I have since learned the wonders of the big, furry spiders and no longer loathe them as I did back then, but twenty-some years ago I had neither love nor affection for the monstrous Ziggy, and he knew it.

From the moment I would walk into my son’s room, (which in itself took a good deal of courage), Ziggy would begin to face off with me. He would turn directly towards me and begin to exhibit his offensive push-ups, his front legs waving in the air like two claws piercing at the weak, human form that was cowering outside his glass cage. I tried to reason with him, explaining that I was only in the room because if I didn’t clean it once in a while it would have been condemned, but Ziggy never accepted that excuse. His beady, extended eyes would drill into me like hot pokers, his tiny tarantula muscles would tense for the attack; I’m pretty sure he even hissed at me a few times and gnashed his razor sharp teeth. Well, okay - maybe the teeth-thing was in my imagination, but you get the picture.

I believe the Ziggy pot came to a boil the day I crept into my son’s room to wade through his sea of dirty clothes, food wrappers and assorted boy’s paraphernalia, and found not just Ziggy in the aquarium but also an identical twin. Two tarantulas now inhabited my world! Somehow, overnight, Ziggy had cloned a brother; just as big, just as furry, just as fierce as the original. The only difference was, while Ziggy postured himself at me, waving his claws, gnashing his teeth and hissing in defiant fury, his revolting twin just sat there, staring.
I did take notice of this phenomena but I was too appalled at finding the twin to really care. I think I started bellowing in midair as I made the leap to Kris’s bed,
“KRISTOPHER!”

“Huh?” As it turned out, Kris was in the closet fastening little plastic skulls to his shoelaces, but I could not see him for the mounds of clutter that surrounded him.

I was doing my panic-dance on his bed, sending pieces of food and dirty socks bouncing up and down with me on the mattress, “Where did you get that!?” I demanded. It was pretty amazing I could speak at all as I was seriously hyperventilating.

Kris’s blue eyes peeked out from his cave of clutter, “Get what?”

“THAT!” I screeched, pointing to the aquarium. “The other spider!”

Now my brave, foolish son crawled out of his closet and meandered over to Ziggy’s home where he grinned and reached in (arrrggh!) and picked up the Twin Tarantula by a fuzzy leg, “This?” he asked innocently, waving it in front of me like a prize.

My eyes, which happen to be the same, innocent shade of blue as my son’s, were rolling like pinwheels, “Yes! That! Who told you that you could get another…”

“Mom!” Kris interrupted me, still smirking, “Calm down! It’s just his exoskeleton.”
“His what?”

“His exoskeleton. His skin. He shedded his skin…see? It’s not a real spider…it’s Ziggy’s skin.”

It took a few moments for the words to sink in but as my heart rate went from three hundred beats a minute to two-twenty, I realized the Thing Kris was holding in front of me was, in truth, inanimate. Exoskeleton? Who had heard of such a thing? Since when do spiders shed whole copies of themselves? And why did my ten-year-old son know this when I did not? Well, that part was unimportant, “Okay, okay…exoskeleton…but that’s it for Ziggy! My heart can’t take this anymore. I want that beast out of here by tomorrow, before he escapes that cage and comes searching for me in the night!”

Kris looked amused, but managed to whine anyway, “You mean get rid of him? Ahhhh, Mom….”

“I don’t care what you do with him! Feed him to Monty if you want, but I want him out of this house! Him and his exoskeleton buddy!”

“Mom, snakes don’t eat tarantulas…”

“OUT, Kristopher! Out! Out! Out!”

I should have known these words, spoken in motherly haste, would lead to yet another problem, but at the time I wasn’t thinking of anything but my own survival. So when Kris packed up Ziggy and his Twin the following morning and told me he was taking him to school for the Science Lab, I felt truly liberated. My nemesis was gone. Long live Ziggy, as long as he lived somewhere else.

It was about a week later that I received the phone call from Mr. Owens, the Principal at my son’s school. We were actually on a first-name basis, as I was with every teacher and principal who ever had the distinct pleasure of dealing with my Kris. This is not bragging on my part, this is a rather sad fact.

“Hello, this is Paul Owens,” began the conversation.

My blood ran cold, “Yeeessss…?”

“Were you aware that Kris brought a pet tarantula to school?”

My stomach dropped to my knees, “Yeeessss…?”

Principal Owens cleared his throat, “Yes, well…we’ve had a small incident involving the spider. I thought you should know.”
Oh, no.

“It seems one of the children didn’t fasten the lid to the aquarium and Ziggy escaped.”

“Oh…?” I’m sure my voice was cracking.

“Yes…uummm…he ended up in the light fixture above Mrs. Soames’ head and he sort of – dropped - down onto her hair. Well, she passed out, you see, and in the resulting melee, Ziggy was thrown across the room and landed in Lisa Carpenter’s lunchbox, which she proceeded to fling out the window and onto the windshield of Vice Principal Greene’s car.” Mr. Owens explained in a patient, but exasperated tone.

I could feel my heart dripping into my shoes, “It broke the windshield, right?”

“Well, yes…it did that.”

There wasn’t really much I could say or do. I believe to this day that I heard the beginning of a chuckle in Principal Owens’ voice but I can’t prove it. My mind was going over all possible aspects of the event, including whether or not my personal insurance would pay for Vice Principal Greene’s windshield or the psychological trauma caused to Mrs. Soames or poor Lisa Carpenter. And exactly how many Detention days for Kris would be involved, because his being kept after school meant me having to leave work to pick him up. Selfish, I admit, but these things worry a mother.

Still, even after my thoughts and concerns for the victims of the crime at hand, the words that came out of my mouth at that moment were aimed in a completely different direction, “What about Ziggy? Is he alright?”

Principal Owens just sighed, “The last we saw of him, he was crawling off towards the edge of the playground.”

I felt relief. Ziggy was free!

"Chappy"

2009-09-29T07:45:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-09-26T07:54:00.000-07:00

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"

2009-09-26T07:49:00.000-07:00

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"

2009-09-25T11:14:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-09-22T13:55:00.000-07:00

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"

2009-09-18T16:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-15T16:35:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-09-14T09:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-12T14:44:00.000-07:00

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…”

2009-09-07T15:38:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-04T18:14:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-09-03T17:44:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-09-03T17:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-02T10:05:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-08-31T09:09:00.000-07:00

Marty was in our custody for almost two years before his case was finally decided. During that time he went from normal and chatty to solemn and quiet, from sane and rational to bizarre and unstable, from tearful to jovial and back around again. This was not all that unusual for an inmate with a mental health condition. I had seen it before; the emotional roller coaster of mentally ill people can be astonishing and Marty’s array of daily mood swings and activities were not really out of the norm. What was uncommon, in my opinion, was that those emotions, mood swings and bouts of insanity seemed to coincide with visits from his psychiatrist.

We had to house Marty in with the sex offenders and child molesters, although whenever he began hearing the voices he was relocated into the infirmary until the moment passed. It was a high profile case and the killing of his son put him in danger from other inmates, so it was deemed he would be safest living with the other Protective Custody inmates. He got along okay for the most part during his stay with us. He not only gained about eighty pounds but he also watched football and baseball on the TV with the other guys, went out to the recreation yard regularly, joked with the officers, enjoyed visits from friends and clergy and learned how to play gin rummy and chess with his cellmates.

He also learned how to gauge the dates his psychiatrist would be coming to visit. About two days before each impending court ordered visit, Marty would begin to report the voices were threatening him again. He would stop talking or involving himself with others, would sit on his bunk and stare at the wall and take on the appearance of someone deep in a catatonic trance.
The psychiatrist who came to deal with Marty must have been a truly amazing doctor. Actually there were several doctors and psychologists who were involved in the case and for the most part, the ones who visited Marty in jail were true miracle workers. Not two hours after they visited and Marty was returned, silent and staring, to his cell, his voices would vanish and he would be back watching Roadrunner cartoons with his cellmates. I was amazed. Never had I seen such medical miracles!

I am not a doctor. I am not even a licensed psychologist, but I am capable of watching a person go from mental illness to mental normalcy in a period of an hour or so and finding it a bit unusual. I had a lot of opportunity to talk with Marty and he was almost always quiet, polite and willing to chat but he virtually never said one word about his parents or son. He did not seem capable of harming them, or of harming anyone for that matter. On the other hand, he did not attempt to hide his crime or ever deny his involvement, and there was no good motive for him to have committed such a travesty. It was a puzzle that was never solved to my satisfaction. Was he lead by voices to slaughter his parents and son? This is rather uncommon for schizophrenics; they rarely harm anyone except themselves, but still…

Marty did not go to prison, he was sent to the state hospital for an indeterminate period of time. Whatever demons were plaguing him 14 years ago have evidently left for greener pastures because, to my knowledge, he has not been back in the jail system and I am fairly sure he has been released from the state hospital. I have never forgotten him, however, nor have I forgotten the bloody photos of his four-year-old son and the mystery that surrounded it all.

I mentioned Marty in this memoir only because it is true that the mind is a strange thing. Most people would say a man would have to be insane to kill his family that way, but the Marty I knew for almost two years in jail was as normal as anyone else behind those bars, except when the psychiatrist was due. So, who can say? Regardless of what caused him to “snap” on that awful day, the result is that he is now living the rest of his life without his parents or the love of his son. I suppose that is punishment enough for any crime, premeditated or driven by a demon. And we will never really know for sure.

"Marty"

2009-08-30T16:46:00.000-07:00

For the average person it is difficult to know for sure if another person is truly mentally ill or, perhaps, just acting the part. Even professionals with walls full of PhD certificates can be fooled, and most of them will admit that. It is not an exact science, and there are so many levels of mental illness and personality disorders that overlap one another it becomes mind-boggling in and of itself.

Mental health professionals rely on self-reporting from their patients. There is no infallible blood test or x-ray that can tell if a person has schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or is antisocial. The only tests which psychologists and psychiatrists have all relied on are their patients answering of questions which are designed to provide insight into their mental condition.

In most cases this works well. The majority of people who are suffering from a mental or emotional disorder truly want to be helped and they do their best to interact with their doctor or counselor as candidly as they can. In these cases the doctor or counselor can generally make a pretty good diagnosis and is then able to treat the person with medications or counseling session or whatever is deemed necessary. It is the best system we have to date and it has helped countless thousands of people lead much better lives.

It does not, however, always work well within the criminal justice system. There are those in our society who commit crimes of every sort and then try to escape punishment for that crime by saying they are mentally ill and therefore not responsible for their actions. It comes down to whether or not the person knows, or knew, right from wrong. My opinion on that subject, though not professional, shall be reserved for the next chapter.

Marty came into the jail fresh from the emergency room at Yavapai Regional Medical Center. He had a glazed look on his face and his head was swathed with bandaging that seemed to cover some sort of protruding lump. It was not apparent if his zombie-like state was from medication or his current mental condition but he did attract a lot of attention from the jail staff. This, of course, was also due to the fact that he had just killed both his parents and his four-year-old son with a ball-peen hammer while his wife was out of town. Rumor had it that after slaughtering his immediate family, he then turned the hammer on himself and whacked himself in the head hard enough to necessitate a trip to the ER before taking him to jail. I might add, it was not hard enough to end his life, as it had his parents and son.

Marty was the first (and to my knowledge the only) inmate from which I ever took footprints as well as fingerprints. During and after the attack he had walked through the blood barefoot and left footprints at the scene so it was necessary to print his feet in ink. I’m not sure how necessary this was because Marty never denied committing the murders. His defense was insanity.

Before the killings he had driven himself to the ER that morning or afternoon, I do not recall which, and reported to the hospital staff he was hearing voices that were telling him to do terrible things, some of these were to kill his family. This was in order to “save” them from something even more horrendous, but I was never clear on what that might have been. The story began that the family contacted the local mental health facility and after a screening, Marty was given an antidepressant and then released. At that point he proceeded to drive home and kill his family, whose members were either demons themselves, or were going to be attacked by demons. This was a lot of years ago and I have forgotten some of the minute facts. The main point, which I remember well, were the photos I saw of his four-year-old son lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor...

2009-08-29T08:05:00.000-07:00

Carl was a Vietnam Vet who had come home from the war living in another universe. He was in and out of Yavapai County jail a few times in my first years working there, typically for being a public nuisance. I don’t believe he ever harmed anyone but he was big, scruffy and dirty-looking and wandered around town in his battered, filthy Army fatigues while being very loud and opinionated.

Carl’s diagnosis was Paranoid Schizophrenia, which does not mean (contrary to what many believe) he had a split or dual personality. It means, in layman’s terms, he had a split with reality, and Carl’s split was a real doozey! It was a chasm, actually, something akin to the Grand Canyon.

It is no wonder to me that Schizophrenics become paranoid. They exist in a world we do not hear or see but one that is all too real to them. If I had to live my days with several unknown (and sometimes well-known) people shouting at me inside my head, or listen to a barrage of demons giving me orders to cut crosses on myself with a tuna can lid, I would be paranoid, too.

They also know people are plotting against them. These people might be Iraqi hit men, or KGB spies, or even our own CIA agents who are trying to force the terrified Schizophrenic to commit a drug deal for them. They know this because they hear the voices talking as plain as day. Voices we can’t hear but voices they can’t get rid of, twenty-four-seven three-sixty-five. They have very distinct memories about aliens and the well-known and dreaded rectal probe, not to mention sexual encounters with the infamous Bat Boy. It has to be a very scary thing. A good percentage of Schizophrenics wind up committing suicide and I’m not sure I blame them.

Some of the voices that entertain them are of a kinder, gentler nature, however. I remember one inmate who was scheduled to see the facility psychiatrist one afternoon but refused to attend the appointment because “the voices are really being funny today.” He was enjoying their company and did not want anything to interrupt the group.

Often the Schizophrenic has a really fascinating life and he will tell you all about it. I’ve known some inmates who (in their minds) were multimillion dollar record producers or financial investors to the President. I even met and got to know the man who invented Plutonium. Really! He told me so. I’ve met Harrison Ford’s brother (Bruce), Howard Hughes’ psychiatrist, and the man who embalmed Elvis. (Yes, alas, it appears Elvis truly is dead). I also met a twenty-year-old girl who kept digging up her dead cat and bringing it to bed with her because, “it got cold at night”. Her poor parents did not know what to do about this and so eventually charged her with criminal littering and had her put in jail where they knew she would get help for her mental health issues one way or another.

It is not all that unusual, actually. Families are often at wit’s end when dealing with schizophrenic children or siblings. It is a frightening disease, which often takes on some violent and weird overtones. If help cannot be gotten from the world outside families will sometimes resort to having the family member arrested, hoping the taxpayers can lend support. We usually do, one way or another, but schizophrenia is a lifelong affliction that is treatable but not curable, and the likelihood of the jail system being there to keep that person safe and off the streets indefinitely is pretty slim.

Carl fell midway between the KGB agents and discovering Plutonium. He was never jovial but he did have times when he seemed to be able to hold a semi-realistic conversation about the voices coming from the TV, (which actually belonged to Walter Cronkite), or what he had had for lunch (sometimes laced with arsenic, but Carl was immune to that poison). He also had a lot of religious dementia. This holds true with a majority of schizophrenics. They almost all have had conversations with God or angels or both and in many cases they actually are God or Jesus or one of the prophets; incognito, of course.

In Carl’s case, when he was on the streets and not in jail, he had an open line to the Almighty, Himself. They discussed a multitude of problems here on earth and Carl was the “One” that God had chosen to help him solve all the tribulations of Mankind. The problem was when Carl was in jail his signal to God was interrupted and they lost contact. There was just too much metal and too many telephonic devices. This was when Carl became hardest to handle.
My father used to tell me, “You cannot have a battle of wits with an unarmed person”, which meant that wasting words on someone who was unable to comprehend them was self-defeating. The officers all tried to get Carl to abide by jail rules, calm down, stop threatening and throwing his meal trays around the room, but when Carl was not connected to God he got pretty irate. He even became dangerous to other inmates. No amount of reasoning or cajoling ever helped, but there was one very clever nurse who invented the cure.

Katie was her name. She had worked in the jail for a while before I got there so she knew the place fairly well. To say Katie was a warm, fuzzy kind of nurse would have been a huge fib. She was caustic, snide, impatient and sometimes close to mean, but she had a way of mind-melding with the mentally ill. I never really understood how, but she really seemed to know what to say to our wacko population at just the right time. (Remember, I told you earlier on that wacko is a medical term.)

At one point during Carl’s first or second visit, Katie grew weary of dealing with his ranting and decided to try and re-establish Carl’s connection to God. There was a large oval chip in the cinder block wall at the side of Carl’s cell that had been stained from someone at an earlier time with red punch. Katie pointed it out to Carl, in whispers of course, and told him that was the Hotline to God, put in only for Carl’s use, and that if Carl told anyone about it, the line would be removed.

“Put your elbow on the red spot,” Katie told him. Carl did that. “Now listen to your thumb,” Carl did that, too, by pressing his thumb into his ear. “Do you hear Him?” Katie asked with a hopeful expression.

I remember the big grin that spread across Carl’s weathered face. His eyes actually took on a glow, “Yeah! I do! I hear Him!” he exclaimed with the joy of a child.

For the next few weeks, and on every visit thereafter, Carl spent most of his days with his elbow pressed up to the hole in the wall and his thumb in his ear. His conversations with God were solemn and lengthy and when they weren’t conversing, Carl spent his time writing down God’s instructions in a commissary notebook. This was, no doubt, for use when he was released and could get back to saving Mankind.

Carl’s visits to the jail stopped rather suddenly and since the last time he was there I saw him around town, now and then, still wearing his Army fatigues and still scaring people with his warnings and prophecies. Evidently the local police decided it wasn’t worth dragging him into jail constantly and began ignoring his antics. Recently, though, he seems to have disappeared completely. Like many other inmates I worked with, I don’t know what happened to Carl. I hope he is all right but there’s no telling. He should be, as long as he keeps his Hotline to God open.

2009-08-27T11:54:00.000-07:00

There is nothing amusing about mental illness. It typically strikes without warning, often lasts a lifetime, and can leave devastation in its wake. The jails and prisons in this country are gradually becoming mental health facilities, and over the past ten years it has not even been gradual. It is now more like a great Mental Health tsunami that is washing over the nation, taking with it all the pride, dignity and future of every soul caught in its churning flood. Jails and prisons, especially jails, are not prepared to take on this burden of mentally ill inmates. Jails are meant to house inmates for short periods of time, hence the term Detention. Jails detain and house people who are being held over for trials or for disposition of their cases, anywhere from twenty-four hours to, well, however long it takes. If a person has broken the law, he or she will remain in jail until they can bond out; are released by the courts; or have a disposition imposed upon them. Typically it is a few weeks or months and because of that the jail systems rarely have enough funding or staffing to provide the long-term care necessary for the mentally ill.

Sometimes mental illness is brought on by drug or alcohol abuse. This can be temporary, such as a person “coming down” from alcohol or any sort of drug; or permanent from damage caused by their substance abuse over very long periods of time. You see a lot of both within the jail system and it is never pleasant.

The first person I ever saw with the DT’s (delirium tremens) was a hardcore alcoholic who had been brought into jail for shoplifting. I had only been there a week or two and was fascinated by the man, who was being housed in the jail infirmary. As the alcohol wore off, he began to display a series of very distressing actions. His entire countenance changed and his face took on an expression of horror. He dug at the edges of the window in the cell door until his fingers were raw. He stood on his bunk, holding himself in terror as he watched something that I could not see, crawling about on the floor, crying for help from anyone who would listen.

Finally my nerves began to wear as thin as his were and I tried to talk to him, thinking I might be able to do what the nurses could not, which was to help the poor guy settle down. I tried to assure him there were no creatures in his cell and that no one was going to harm him. His response was to quote me passages from Revelations mixed with other assorted Bible verses and passages, which did not seem to have much to do with the demons nipping at his toes.
I finally asked him if he wanted me to get the chaplain for him. That was when he announced he had already talked to God and God told him if his eye offended him he should pluck it out. I was about to try to explain to him that this was not a literal order from God and that he would feel a lot better about it after getting some sleep, but he was not listening. In the time it took for me to say about six words the terrified inmate reached up with his thumb and plucked out his eyeball!

I was not prepared for that. Forty-two years of life had not prepared me to see someone pluck out his eyeball when standing eighteen inches in front of me. There was a window in the door between us but even if there had not been, I would not have had a clue as to what I should do. I believe I came close to passing out. I know I stumbled backwards into the wall I and must have made a sound of some sort because the nurse on duty leaped up from her desk and, thankfully, took over.

I do not remember that inmate’s name but I do remember he was my first introduction to the world of mental illness. During the following years I worked with hundreds of mentally ill inmates, some who acted out even worse than the man who plucked out his eye during a bout of DT’s, and some who were just mildly disturbed. Some made me cringe, some made me cry, some made me laugh. All were memorable.

Misty uncovered....

2009-08-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

She went with Misty back into the dress-out room which used to be a small bathroom with a shower and sink and privacy for the changing of street attire into the orange jail uniform. It typically took about five minutes to do a proper and complete dress-out but it was only about sixty seconds before Lena came charging out of the door with a face as red as a stop light.

“Hey!” she exclaimed, her expression a mixture of surprise and annoyance, “That’s not a woman, you jerks! I suppose you think this is real funny, right?”

The idea that someone was playing a practical joke on Lena was really not that hard to believe, it was not at all unusual for officers to torment one another with embarrassing tricks and antics. But to my knowledge, nor that of the Sergeant or other officer on staff, no such practical joke was in process.

“Are you serious?” Sarge asked.

Lena was huffing with annoyance, “That’s a gawdam guy!” she spouted. “And if you think I’m gonna strip search him, you better think again! Real hard!”

Several looks were exchanged and then Rudy, the other male officer, walked over to the change-out room and peered in. His shoulders began to shake, not with fear or annoyance but with the hysterical laughter he was trying to hide. He was unable to contain himself very well though, and when he looked back around at Sarge his eyes were tearing with hilarity.

“She’s right, Sarge, it’s a guy.” He said between gulps of air. “You want me to finish dressing him out?”

Sarge was grinning, not at Misty’s disclosure, but at the furious annoyance on Lena’s face. “I guess you better,” he replied in his typically Former-Marine tone of voice. “Can’t have our little Lena writing us up for harassment.”

The next five minutes was just a back and forth continuum of snide remarks between Sarge and Lena. I was standing by, wondering how poor Misty was faring through it all and also wondering why he did not say something when he was taken back into the bathroom to dress out. Later, after I had gotten to know him, I understood why, but on that summer evening I had not yet come to figure out the workings of the transvestite’s mind.

Rudy immerged in a few minutes with Misty in front of him, now wearing the orange jail uniform and looking somewhat abashed but not really upset. Rudy tossed something to Lena, which she caught in both hands. It was a rather large roll of money.

“Found this on him,” Rudy said, “Better put it on his books.”

“How’d they miss that on the pat down?” Sarge inquired.

Meanwhile, Lena was looking at the roll of bills with a wrinkled nose, “Geeeze, it’s wet...” she murmured, and then her green eyes shot open like ping-pong balls and with a shriek and an audible gag, she flung the money across the booking area and began doing the yucky-bug dance and rubbing her hands against her thighs like she wanted to peel the skin off.

“Ahhh, crap, Rudy! Ah, dammit!” she shouted fiercely. “That’s not funny, you chicken-lips!”
Rudy, Sarge, and even I were laughing in unison by then. Sarge took several moments to catch his breath and then finally asked Rudy where he found the roll of cash. Rudy explained that Misty had his genitals secured back out of sight with a wire bread tie and that the cash had been fastened there along with the package. Further examination proved there was nothing more hidden within.

Once the hilarity ebbed, I began to wonder how on earth Misty, whose real name was Mitchell, ever managed to secure himself so well that he could have worn those spandex pants without a hint of his gender being evident, even through a surface pat-down. Wire bread ties must be amazing things! The discomfort it certainly caused him made me shudder.

Misty, all the while, was taking everything pretty much in stride. I got the impression this was not the first time he had experienced such a situation and if he was embarrassed by it he did not let on. It was also not his first time in jail. He seemed accepting of the whole ordeal.
Typical of the gay community, Misty had one of the keenest senses of humor I have ever known. He had practically invented the word “campy”. He was housed with the sex offenders and child molesters, not because he had even one single trait that earned him that status, but because he was one of those “lost inmates” who could not be placed in the general population for his own safety. That dormitory area was at the far end of the long, echoing hallway, and so every time I went in back to talk with an inmate in one of the other dorms, Misty would pick up on my voice and shout from the back in his very best falsetto, “Hey, Girlfriend!”

You always knew when Misty was being moved, too. As he would pass along by the other dorms, escorted by officers to wherever he was supposed to be, there resounded a flood of hoots, wolf whistles and catcalls that was almost deafening. And not being one to let the others down, Misty would offer up his best hip-wiggle as he passed.

He was in our jail for several months, during which time we grew to be pretty good friends. He invited me to “do lunch” with him some day after he was out and I told him I would love to. I learned that he shaved his entire body every day, which, considering the cheap, plastic razors the jail issues to it’s inmates, would have been enough to dissuade most people from his particular lifestyle. He used red punch to color his fingernails, lips and cheeks, and the women’s buttery pencil shaving concoction for mascara. He never looked quite as feminine as the evening we booked him in but he always turned heads as he walked by, and he had mastered the same walk that made Marilyn Monroe a superstar.

He was also a twenty-three-year-old kid, in my eyes, and well educated at that. During his time in the Yavapai County jail we spent quite a few hours talking about life and all its intricacies. He eventually dropped the falsetto and gay camp and began to expose himself in emotional ways to me.

He was from the Midwest, had left home a couple of years before and was prostituting himself to earn the money for a sex change. He told me his family, good Bible-Belt farm stock, had no idea where he was nor that he was transsexual. “It would kill them,” he told me sadly. I asked him if he didn’t think it was already killing them, not knowing what had become of their son, and he replied that if I knew his family I would understand. They would rather think him dead than know he was transsexual.

It eventually occurred to me that the urge for any human being to want to change his or her sex must be incredible. It was far more than an impulse or a sexual fantasy. To endure the verbal slings and arrows and actual physical discomfort they subjected themselves to, it had to be an incredible psychological obsession or need. Why would anyone choose to be Gay or Lesbian or Transsexual or even a Cross-Dresser? It seems to be the loneliest and most emotionally painful lifestyle one could ever imagine. The desire, the need for that life must be terribly intense, certainly not a life anyone would want to choose capriciously.

Misty could never explain it to me, at least not so that I understood. It was just who he was. He explained he had never felt like “Mitchell”. Ever. His early years had been a series of bad jokes, fights, verbal attacks and lectures from his parents, and his delight in playing with Barbie Dolls. He admitted to me that wanting to change one’s sex, or living a Gay lifestyle, was not natural and probably could be considered sinful if one looked at life that way. He also told me he simply could not live as “Mitchell” anymore - that the thoughts he had of suicide were far scarier than the process he was trying to undertake to become Misty.

I remember thinking that Misty was more like a caricature of women than how real women act or speak. So often that seems to be the case with Gay men - their assumed idiosyncrasies are far more feminine than most of us females truly are. It’s as if they see the ideal woman as a combination of Betty Boop and Mae West, and they strive to identify with that. It’s an impossible journey.

Misty finished his case in our county and eventually was extradited down to Maricopa County to face charges there. I never knew what exactly became of him but I assume he did a little prison time. I have thought about him on and off over the years, hoping he might have gone home to the farm and reconnected with his family, knowing he probably did not. He could be a woman by now, or maybe he is still prostituting himself to try and earn the fee for that change. Or maybe he is dead. I hope not. I probably will never know but I’d like to keep that lunch date one day.

"Misty"

2009-08-25T14:47:00.000-07:00

I want to get into an extremely touchy subject within the world of law enforcement now: Homophobia. Within the large circle of deputies I knew and worked with in the jail, the term Homo meant Homosexual, Transvestite, Transsexual, Cross-Dresser, and Female Impersonator. In their minds there was no real distinction between these types; they were all just Homos. There was such a stigma to the term that most of the deputies sort of spat it out as if the word tasted nasty and simply could not be tolerated.

I suppose I shouldn’t limit this response to deputies alone. Most of the straight men I know feel the same way and have no tolerance or understanding for any life style that doesn’t include locker rooms, girl watching, and deep-fried pork rinds. If a man has a speech impediment or walks just slightly too gracefully he is a definite threat. God forbid he might wear a pink flowered shirt or happen to enjoy Broadway musicals.

This is okay. Really, it is. I love these guys and I understand their phobias. I’m not sure they understand why they are so threatened by effeminate men, but that’s beside the point. It’s the way it has always been, is now, and forever will be. Real men are manly. Real men like to make jokes about big bosoms, eat melt-down-spicy hot wings, watch women wrestle in tubs of mud, attend movies starring Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, and drink cold beer for breakfast. Real men simply do not eat snow-cones; listen to Broadway Sound tracks; watch movies like Steel Magnolias; enjoy a good talk about personal issues, or dance (except western two-steps).
In the world of inmates the feelings seem to be pretty much the same. All jails and prisons in America keep their child molesters, sex offenders and known homosexuals and transsexuals separate from the general population because of the harm they would no doubt come to at the hands of the other inmates. It is okay to rob, cheat, steal, sell drugs (even to kids) and to kill people, but it is not okay to molest a child or rape a woman. The old expression “There is honor among thieves” does have its limits.

Well, sort of. I say this because it has been my experience that these manly men, who will kill a child molester or beat a gay man to death if there is one in the vicinity, will often be involved in raping and/or sodomizing another helpless inmate. It goes on all the time but is usually never reported because the victim is too terrified to say anything.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am in no way condoning child molestation or abuse. It is the most heinous crime I can imagine and I cannot think of a punishment suitable enough for the men who do it. Statistics show most child molesters are Caucasian men while child abusers are men & women of all races, but the fact of the matter is that child molesters are virtually never gay men. Homosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals are typically gentle, inoffensive people who would not harm a child if their very lives depended on it. The hatred and violence enacted upon them by other inmates, and by some of society in general, is directed at their lifestyle and their personalities, not any harmful actions on their parts.

Unfortunately, in the jails and prisons they are often lumped together with the child molesters because no one knows where to place them for their own safety. Their crimes are rarely violent; usually drug or alcohol related or having to do with prostitution or theft. If left alone, they seldom cause trouble, initiate fights or break the facility rules. Violence is not a part of their makeup.

“Misty” came into the booking area on one summer evening in 1992 if memory serves me. She had long, flowing blond hair, was tall and lithe, wearing black spandex pants which left nothing to the imagination, and a lacey crop top which showed her trim midriff quite nicely. She had been arrested for prostitution and also had a warrant out of Phoenix for the same offense so we knew she would be with us for awhile.

Male officers do not generally frisk female prisoners as thoroughly as they would a male prisoner for obvious reasons. The exception to this is if the female is suspected of drugs or weapons but Misty had none of those types of charges. This being the case they left the strip search to one of the female detention officers. Not myself as I was working at the booking desk. The privilege went to Lena, a young officer who had done a lot of Reserve Deputy work for the Sheriff’s Office but had not been working in Detention for very long. Lena was pretty well-versed in the world of criminals and jails and most anything to do with law enforcement, but she was not prepared for what she was about to encounter....

Lorna and God

2009-08-24T13:17:00.000-07:00

One of our chaplains, a really amazing man with a wicked sense of humor, used to say that he was absolutely sure God lived in the Yavapai County jail. He knew this because every inmate who came into the jail eventually found God, and every inmate who was released seemed to leave God there. Made sense to me.

Lorna seemed to have had an on-again-off-again relationship with God which was directly related to her consumption of alcohol. The more sober she was, the more she believed. After she had been in jail for a couple of weeks and had dried out sufficiently to understand how much trouble she was in, she proceeded to find her way back to religion.

Please do not misunderstand. I believe any course that leads away from lives of drugs, alcohol and crime is a good one, and if that course involves the use of religion and faith, so much the better. It’s just that I worked in the jail long enough to know that in 99 percent of all the cases, the love of drugs and alcohol, and the lifestyle that accompanies it, is just too strong to relinquish to God. We come back to that bad choices thing again, I suppose.

And now I have to eat my words and tell you that Lorna was that one percent inmate. Not in the beginning, mind you. In the beginning she was the Queen of Lip Service, and all the other, much younger inmates would gather around her looking for leadership and guidance. And a new and better way to style their hair at night with toilet paper rollers.

Gradually, over the course of the year and a half she was in jail waiting for trial, her entire being changed. The homemade makeup grew fainter and the audacious attitude mellowed. It was in good part due to the drying-out process, allowing her head to clear and the realization of what had happened to set in. She began keeping a journal and on several occasions showed me letters she had written and received from her family, all of whom had basically written her off as a lost cause and a point of embarrassment.

By the time her trial came around she was just “Mom” to the other girls in the dorm, and no longer the flamboyant, muddle-brained creature that had first thrust herself into the world of incarceration. She had even stopped preaching to the others. Instead she was the one who greeted the new ones and took time to listen to their worries, angers and fears. She had found her place so to speak, in the most unlikely of circumstances.

I still hear from Lorna occasionally. She writes from prison where she is serving a sentence of seventeen to twenty-five years. She teaches reading to the illiterate prisoners, works in the warden’s garden and leads Bible studies. Her letters are clear, introspective and well written. She is hopeful and even has a plan for her release. She will be seventy-two years old by then, if she is in there for 17 years, but feels she will still have something good to offer.

I agree. I’m sure she will. I hope I run into her somehow when that day comes because I would like to sit and talk with her, to have coffee and discuss the world and what has occurred in it, and to tell her I was wrong about her. She was the one percent.

Lorna

2009-08-23T19:17:00.000-07:00

I remember watching some old B-grade movie once called Women in Chains. I could not tell you who the stars were nor even what the plot was about except that it involved women in prison. I do distinctly recall that the downtrodden women who wore those chains had hair and makeup to rival that of any movie star and astonishing figures that poured voluptuously from their scant prison attire. Funny, but I never met a female inmate who looked like a movie star or appeared voluptuous in her uniform. Many of them, though, were under the misguided belief that they did.

Be that as it may, inmates truly can be ingenious when they want to. It’s almost astonishing. Who needs a drug store or beauty salon when you have jail issued cosmetics right there at your disposal? Red punch can be used for lipstick and also cheek rouge. Pancake syrup, if thinned with water, acts just as effectively as hair spray or mousse, and strips of toilet paper can be twisted around the hair to set it in curls at night. You can also scrape a lead pencil against a cinder block wall to get shavings that are then mixed with butter and used for eyeliner and shadow. It works pretty well, actually, as long as you don’t mind getting lead shavings and butter in your eyes. Ah! What price beauty?

I remember one young gal who came into the jail one afternoon with bleached platinum blonde hair and went to court the next morning sporting a luscious shade of lime green. I believe it had something to do with the gelatin dessert on her supper tray. It was trendy and the flies really gathered nicely about her head, but it didn’t do much to impress the judge. He didn’t release her. Neither did he release the girl who offered to leave her purse with the court “for collateral”, nor the one who flashed the judge a lengthy view of her less-than-ample bosom. Female inmates are a hoot.

I remember Lorna because she was an expert at all of the above, from make-up to hair mousse to judge-flashing. She was not a young woman, indeed she was pushing fifty-something and didn’t have anything very interesting to flash with, but I gave her credit for trying.
Lorna had shot and killed her husband. It was never really determined who started the quarrel because they were both drunk at the time, but Lorna was the survivor with the “smoking gun”, so to speak, and she never really denied the incident. Her defense was that the shooting was “accidental”, that her husband had egged her on, shouting at her to “go ahead and shoot!”. Lorna said he would not stop yelling at her to shoot him and she got so agitated and upset that she lost control of her grip and the gun just went off. The fact that the gun went off accidentally five times was sort of damning, but what the heck? Could happen.

It seems to occur a lot, actually, women shooting their husbands or significant others. Most of them do not claim it as being “accidental” though. Most tend to say it was due to domestic abuse and many have the bruises and scars to prove it. Over the years that I worked in the Prescott Jail there were probably a dozen such lethal incidents, and in this somewhat small part of the world that’s a fairly large percentage. The instinct of someone such as myself is to wonder, Why the heck didn’t she just leave the bastard? Why send herself to prison for ten or fifteen years? Of course this question is raised by on-lookers in just about every incident of domestic violence on record and it doesn’t take long to learn it just isn’t that simple. Lorna stayed with her spouse for whatever her reasons were, just as all abused women do. Fear, poverty, co-dependency, the issues are far too complicated to delve into just now and my expertise in that area is limited. Suffice it to say most women in abusive relationships do stay, often with tragic results.

There had been a history of domestic abuse, according to Lorna, but she stated she had never reported it because “she loved him”. When we talked she told me he had sent her to the Emergency Room on several occasions but she always made up excuses as to what had caused her injuries. Besides, when he wasn’t drinking (and when she wasn’t drinking) he was such a good, kind man. They had a wonderful life together. She could not bring herself to throw it all away because of a “little” arguing.

Lorna mourned for her spouse for a while, but not very long. It was only a matter of a couple of weeks, in fact, before she began her flirtations with the Detention Officers and that was when her creativity with jail cosmetics and inappropriate exposure reached the ultimate heights. She became the Tammy Faye Bakker of the female dorm, mixing up colorful concoctions from beet juice, gelatin, punch, commissary candy and leftover coffee. The makeup parties became a regular evening event, with all the women trying to create artwork out of leftover food products. The jail staff condoned none of these activities but there was little anyone could do to prevent them and the resulting faces were as entertaining as all three of Ringling Brother’s rings.
She also found God....

Doc's escape

2009-08-22T15:32:00.000-07:00

Doc had one other distinction during his stay in our jail, and that was his involvement in one of the two escapes from the facility over the years. He and two equally psychotic cohorts managed to wriggle out through an air vent in the ceiling of their cell one night during visitation and somehow managed to make it out through the roof of the jail to the world beyond. The problem was, none of them was from the area and they had no idea where they were or how to get away.
Since it was nighttime and thus very dark outside, the three amigos did not even know which direction was north and using the stars evidently was not in their realm of abilities. They ended up in a nearby housing development where they broke into the home of an elderly couple who proceeded to feed them bologna sandwiches, cookies and cola until the SWAT team arrived to bring them back to jail. When questioned later, the elderly couple went on and on about how polite and nice the three escapees were, just like their own grandsons. They couldn’t understand why such fine young boys were being held in jail. Surely they would not harm a single fly and wouldn’t we please check into the matter and see if a mistake hadn’t been made?

The whole episode lasted about four or five hours and Doc was slightly embarrassed at being so poorly prepared, but he spent the rest of his stay with us in the jail boasting about how he had escaped from our maximum-security facility. I suppose he had a right to boast about it, not that anyone cared very much. What seemed far more material to his peers was the fact that he and his amigos ended up right back where he started, with two more years for the crime of “escape” tacked on to whatever sentence he would eventually receive.

While I make lightly of this event, it could have turned out much differently. Of the three escapees all were in jail for homicide and one of them was even more extremely unbalanced than Doc, having committed his murder in a frenzied knife and pistol attack on a middle-aged lady who just happened to be home when he did not expect her to be there. For reasons no one really knew, Doc evidently stopped the other two from harming the elderly couple, or that’s how the story goes. It would have been easy for them to use a household knife or any other weapon and do real harm to the couple but they did not. They could have taken the couple’s car and made a dash for it, but they didn’t attempt that either.

Maybe, somewhere under the bravado and personality disorder, Doc did have one small spark of conscience. Or, more likely he just knew he wouldn’t get very far even if they did manage to evade the SWAT team because he still had no idea where they were or how to get to a highway and escape. The truth is more likely the latter. Doc was mean as a bent snake, but he was not stupid.

He finally ended up going to prison in Florence for twenty-five years to life. I heard a rumor he had been attacked in a knife fight shortly after arriving but had survived it. In the years since I’ve heard nothing more. I have no doubt, however, he is still communicating with a dozen or more love-struck women and charming his way into their souls. Doc was my first lesson on Sociopaths and just how unpredictable they can be. I can understand now why people, especially young women, fall prey to their charm and become their victims so easily.

...more on Doc

2009-08-21T08:09:00.000-07:00

His given name is unimportant but his nickname was “Doc” and he was pretty much covered with tattoos. He had been arrested for murder, a drug deal gone very bad, after which he and his girlfriend had tried hiding in the juniper woods north of town for a day or so before they were apprehended. This decision was about as bad as the rest of the decisions Doc had made in life because north of Prescott there is pretty much no food, water, or survival options, and in the winter and spring it is damned cold. To hide out there, on foot, was a very bad plan. Then again, I don’t believe he had planned anything that happened during the day of the murderous drug deal. Sociopaths often get caught without a plan.

Doc was my first murderer, my first Sociopath: a person with no conscience, a person who knows right from wrong but really does not care as long as what he is doing makes him feel good. Aside from his dirty, bloodstained fingers and clothes, his plethora of bizarre tattoos and the missing lobe of his right ear (bitten off in a prison fight) he really didn’t look like a killer. Then again, who is to say what a killer looks like?

He was a really handsome guy, in a somewhat Charlie Manson kind of way. What I mean by this is he had long hair, was slight of build and his dark eyes could pierce holes into your heart. His features were incredibly youthful, however, almost “pretty”, and his smile was quick, bright, and totally delightful. He was quite the ladies’ man and would have made a fine catch for any lovely, young lady if he hadn’t been quite so deadly.

He truly believed he was a ladies man, though. The charm oozed out of him like mustard from a hot dog bun. He could discuss almost anything, from tying your shoes to rocket science, and he seemed to know what he was talking about all the time. He even told me, as I awkwardly rolled his fingerprints, what I should do to get the best set possible. He explained his whorls and arches and how the FBI uses those to match prints and why we should always have our arrestees rub lotion into their skin before taking prints. Preferably Corn Huskers Lotion, Doc told me, rather like a father directing a child. It softens the skin and makes cleaner prints.

I really wasn’t listening all that much. I was shaking too hard and was determined to get the fingerprints right the first time. It wasn’t easy, what with the Sergeant standing over my shoulder and the blood stains on Doc’s hands, not to mention that two days in the woods had added another unique and interesting aroma to his entire being. I also kept wondering what the headless woman tattooed on his shoulder meant (was he afraid of headless women?), who was the person who had bitten off his ear lobe, and what had prompted the fight that caused it. And why had he been in prison that time?

Curiously, Doc did not seem too concerned about the whole procedure. He was very amicable and informative, including his interesting play-by-play report on how the shooting went down and how he could see right through the guy; the hole was so big! Of course, all of that was way more information than any of us officers cared to know. No one wants to hear a suspect rambling on about the killing he committed three days earlier, not that it wasn’t extremely interesting, but being privy to such chatter will inevitably wind you up in the witness chair at his trial. Doc was rather proud of his recent notoriety and how it had taken two whole days for the cops to find them and all he had really done was rid the world of one more drug dealer, after all. He should get an award, not a prison term. The fact that his drug dealer victim was a 70-year-old man didn’t seem to make much difference to him.

Looking back, I believe Doc had the distinction of spending the longest time in the Yavapai County jail waiting to go to trial of anyone I can recall. It was almost two and a half years. His girlfriend was in a separate part of the jail and spent her days trying desperately to contact him. Meanwhile Doc was keeping up a running correspondence with half a dozen women on the outside, swearing to each of them his undying love, faithfulness, and the desire to father their children. After his mug shot was published in the local paper as part of the news story, several lovesick girls began to write him and it mushroomed from there. Doc was the only guy I ever knew in the jail whose mug shot came out looking really good. Most people, no matter how minor their crime may be, look like insane serial killers in their mug shots, including the officers and civilian employees who have to be photographed for their files. Anyway, on the front page of the newspaper Doc looked almost heroic. He was a combination of Johnny Depp and Batman with a little Psycho thrown in for good measure. As I mentioned earlier, Doc was a good-looking guy and for some young women and girls the excitement of his bad-boy image was just too much to pass up.

It got to the point, finally, when two or three of his “women” on the outside showed up at the same time for visitation. The fur began to fly. It happened on several occasions during the time he was in our jail but it didn’t worry Doc at all. The women always seemed to forgive him and continue to stay in contact. Even his girlfriend in the female dorm (who eventually knew about all of it) found it in her heart to forgive him and to stand by her man. For Doc there were always more women on the string, so if he lost one or two along the way to a jealous rage, what did it matter? For the life of me I still do not know how he kept finding so many girls to fall at his jail-bound feet! I believe he really enjoyed the catfights and squabbles; they made him feel special, in a sociopathic kind of way.

"Doc"

2009-08-19T20:55:00.000-07:00

I am not a big fan of tattoos. It has always seemed to me that after a mother spends nine months of her life doing everything possible to assure her newborn baby will be healthy and perfect in every way, that baby has no right to grow up and destroy his or her perfect skin with a bunch of ink and graven images. I feel the same about most unusual body piercings, too, but those will fade away in time if the person takes out the metal object, unless it is a hole the size of a carrot in his or her ear lobe. Tattoos, on the other hand, are there to stay without extensive laser surgery or the removal of the body part where the tattoo exists.

I read an article written by a psychiatrist that said people get tattoos of things they are basically afraid of: Grim Reapers, skulls, daggers, etc. I’m not sure if I agree with this because my own son had a tattoo of a buxom cowgirl on his chest and knowing him as I did, he was not the least bit fearful of buxom cowgirls. But I digress. The point I was beginning to make was that there must be some great inner obsession for anyone to endure having a needle pounded into one’s flesh over and over just to express his or her desire to communicate something to the world. Wouldn’t it be easier to take out an ad in the newspaper or have a tee shirt printed with the same picture or slogan?

Well, maybe not. There are very few inmates that I ever came across, maybe two percent, who did not have tattoos. It’s like the jail smells, it seems to go with criminal activity. However, you would inevitably find a six foot four inch, 350 pound fellow, covered from head to toe with tattoos and piercings, his forearm dotted with dozens of needle marks and scars from the various concoctions he injected into himself, who would then faint at the sight of the tiny needle we used to test for TB exposure. Go figure.

Some of the tattoos really are works of art, though. I’ll admit that. Not the ones that come out of prison. Usually those are done with sharpened paperclips and ink from a ballpoint pen or Kool-Aid and tend to be fuzzy and resemble the artwork my five-year-old grandson brings home from kindergarten. But the tattoos that are professionally done can be honestly amazing in detail and color. One fellow had an entire scene from The Hobbit etched across his back in fairyland colors so detailed you could see the hair on Frodo’s toes. On the other end of the spectrum, though, was the jovial, aged biker who sported Give Me Head Until I’m Dead engraved around his bald forehead in fading black ink. To each their own and if the truth be known, the biker’s message was easier to decipher than that of the man with Frodo on his back.

There was also a young man who, when being booked in, was asked the usual question of “Do you have any scars, marks or tattoos?” He proceeded to proudly display his penis to everyone in the booking area and explained “It gets really cool when I get a hard-on!” He was speaking of the cobra tattoo on his penis, a truly amazing work of colorful art that must have taken hours of excruciating pain to complete. None of us knew quite what to say. I still wouldn’t know, even after all these years. As far as I know, none of us ever got to see it in its fully-intended glory. I was curious but not driven.

The first truly amazing array of tattoos I got really close to came when I had been working at the jail about a week and my shift sergeant decided I was ready to learn to take fingerprints. Trust me here, folks, taking fingerprints is not as simple as it looks on TV. The process of taking fingerprints is something akin to performing frontal lobe surgery, they have to be clear enough for the Feds to read without error and it’s very difficult to get a set of un-smudged fingerprints when you’re nervous and sweating and trying to print bloodied fingers! But I digress once again. It was not the lesson on finger printing that sticks in my mind, it was the first inmate I ever had to print.....

Ernie

2009-08-18T20:02:00.000-07:00

One of the first things I ever learned about my new job was that there is something uniquely unappetizing about the aroma of a jail. A fellow officer aptly described the smell of the jail as something akin to Ass Soup. It was a colorful description but it really fit perfectly. If you take toe jam, sweat, bad teeth, alcohol and greasy hair, then add the aroma of partially digested jailhouse beans and stir in some day-old tuna sandwiches and you’ve just about got it. I’ve never quite understood the connection between crime and bad hygiene but it really seems to go together. The cells had perfectly good showers and the inmates all had soap, shampoo, razors, toothbrushes and paste, but the whole place still smelled constantly like a mix of locker room and sewer. It’s one of those Unsolved Mysteries, something like Crop Circles and UFO’s. The sad part is that after a while you kind of get accustomed to the aroma. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, it just happens, like working at a landfill.

The women are not quite as bad as the men. The female shower is constantly going and they tend to know what a toothbrush is used for. Actually the men know, too. They sharpen the plastic handles and use them for weapons. Women also seem more likely to cover themselves when wandering about the cell, unless there is a good looking male deputy nearby and then it’s a no-holds-barred kind of event.

The first morning on the job I was assigned to serving coffee to the men at the 0600 wake-up. Inmates came straggling and stumbling from their cells to the bean chutes with cups in hand, hair in eyes, wearing nothing but jail issued boxer shorts, which did nothing to disguise the early morning “boners” and breath that would gag a maggot and peel the paint off the cinder block walls. It always reminded me of a scene from The Night of the Living Dead, although it might have been a toss-up as to what smelled worse, the inmate’s lack of dental hygiene or the Living Dead themselves.

This is what first brought Ernie to my attention. He was a young man, thin to the point of being nearly gaunt, and dotted with some very fierce, angry tattoos, but I never saw him when he was not freshly showered and his long hair clean and combed back into a neat braid or ponytail. He stood out, so to speak, simply because he tried his best to stay clean. While he was no genius, Ernie did know how to read and spell and his conversation was only spattered ever so slightly with jailhouse lingo, at least in my presence. He was soft-spoken and did not cause any undue amount of trouble and he was the first inmate I ever really had the opportunity to get to know.

Our initial conversation started over a tattoo on his left bicep, which I noticed while doing a clothing exchange. It was a pink heart with butterflies around it and the name “Gina” tattooed inside. Compared to the rest of his body art, this was impossibly out of place. Ernie had decorated himself with a few skulls and swastikas and demons and the Grim Reaper, not to mention a few snakes, spiders and fuck the worlds thrown in with a plethora of knife scars for good measure. It was all pretty typical of most of the body art and scarring that passed through the jail, but the pink heart with the butterflies and Gina did not seem to fit so I asked him about it.

“Gina’s my kid,” Ernie softly replied. “I haven’t seen her in six years but I carry her with me all the time.”

I asked him where she was.

“Dead,” Ernie stated without batting an eye. “Her and my old lady both was killed in a car wreck. Some dude on crack hit’em.”

It occurred to me at that point I might have an idea why Ernie sported so many scars and such angry tattoos.

“I never been all that much, ya’ know? But we had us a real good family back then,” Ernie told me thoughtfully. “I dunno what Bev seen in me but we was real good together. I was workin’ as a mechanic down in San Diego and my old lady worked doin’ house cleanin’. Wasn’t much but she could keep Gina with her so that was good. No babysitters, I mean. I was smokin’ a little pot back then but Bev never did no drugs at all. She was a good mother. She wanted lots of kids. So did I.”

I had no comments for him at that point because what can you say? Ernie went on to explain he just gave up after he lost his wife and little girl. No excuses at all, he just didn’t care anymore. It was easier to hide in a fog of cocaine and narcotics and alcohol than to deal with the life he had left.

Six years later Ernie had been in and out of prison twice for burglary and possession of narcotics and now he was looking at a third sentence. This time it was for selling Methamphetamines. He figured he would pull a term of twelve to fifteen years but he wasn’t worried about it. He had “family” in the joint and besides, he wouldn’t last the sentence anyway.

“Why?” I asked.

“I got AIDS”, Ernie shrugged.

Our conversation ended at that point but it was not our final chat by any means. During the following months before Ernie was tried and sentenced to the prison in Florence we had quite a few talks and I got to know him fairly well. His earliest childhood memories were from age five or six, sitting around the coffee table with his father and mother in their house “somewhere in LA”, drinking beer and sharing a “joint”. It struck me as somewhat unbelievable. My own earliest memories were of Christmas trees, birthday parties and Disneyland. Smoking a joint with ones’ parents as a first memory was just completely over the top for me. But remember, I was raised by Ozzie and Harriet.

According to Ernie, it was pretty much downhill from early childhood on. He admitted his choices in life were his own and not his parent’s fault, so I had to give him credit for that. Ninety nine percent of the inmates I ever came across would never take responsibility for their actions. It was always someone else’s fault; their parents, their teachers, their friends or the system in general. I remember one guy, in jail for beating his wife half to death, who told me, “Yeah, I punched the bitch! But she asked for it! She knew I was in a bad mood ‘cuz the Rams lost! She should’a kept her mouth shut!”

Ernie had accepted the consequences of his actions, at least to a point, and did not complain about his past or future, but he still carried a simmering, visible anger over the loss of his wife and daughter. Bev and Gina had helped him make better decisions for a while, but after that driver, stoned on crack cocaine, took their lives….well…

There were things about Ernie that few people ever knew. He wrote great poetry, for instance, mainly about angels and dragons and things that were not of this world. And he could sing like Pavarotti. What a voice that young man had! Some nights when I was on graveyard shift Ernie’s voice would echo out of the dorm, often accompanied by a few fellow inmates, and all of us on duty would listen. I, myself, wondered why that voice and that poetic soul ended up in the Yavapai County jail, dying of AIDS? Would Ernie’s life, his choices, have been different if he had had a different childhood? I have wondered similar things about similar inmates over the years and have never come to any real conclusions because in each instance there were always as many differences as there were similarities in the inmates. But it was at this point, meeting and getting to know Ernie, I began to pay attention and make mental notes to myself to try and find out, if only for my own satisfaction. In some way, Ernie was the beginning of this memoir and I thank him for that.

I heard Ernie died in prison two years after our last conversation. He was thirty years old. AIDS took another victim. He was the first person I ever knew who died from AIDS. Unfortunately, he would not be the last.

Not Mayberry

2009-08-18T08:34:00.000-07:00

After all the testing was done I had nothing to do but sit back and wait. It was about three weeks later when, out of the blue, I received a phone call asking me if I wanted to go to work. The question was rather dumb, I thought. Why on earth would anyone go through such an extensive hiring process, including the dread polygraph, if they did not want to go to work? But I replied in a friendly, nonplussed tone, “Yes, please”. The voice on the telephone went on, “And since you have a degree in art, would you be interested in working as a forensic and composite artist as well? It would not be often, but when we need you?”

I explained that I had never done a composite drawing in my life, although portraits were one of my greatest interests. The voice on the phone didn’t sound like he had heard me. He simply said, “That’s okay, we’ll teach you!” (I was sent to school for a certificate in Composite/Forensic Drawing the second year of my employment.) I was also told to report to the jail the following Monday morning at 0800 hours sharp!

Yavapai County jail was an old jail, even back then. If one creates a mental image of what a jail is like, the old Yavapai County jail would fit that description to a tee. The cell floors were cement, the whole building was cinderblock and steel, the passageways back by the cells were narrow and somewhat dark, badly in need of paint and some sort of ambience, and there were iron bars and metal mesh screens between the inmates and the officers. Nowadays the new jails are well lit and have replaced metal bars and screens with heavy duty, non-breakable plastic. The floors are still cement and the bunks and furnishing are still metal but even that will be improved upon with time, I suppose.

There have been no changes in the inmates, however, and I doubt there ever will be. I was a girl from an upper-middle class family, raised by educated, mannerly parents (like I mentioned earlier; Ozzie & Harriet), who had never even heard most of the words that now flew around me in a constant barrage. Not at me, mind you. I don’t believe in all my years in the jail I ever had an inmate actually curse at me, but to say their every day language was colorful would be a tremendous understatement. Most inmates have about a fifth grade education and it really made itself clear in their conversations. It took some adjusting on my part. A lot of things would take some adjusting on my part over the next several years. Not the least of which were the inmates in general.

I grew up watching Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Hawaii Five-0, and The Fugitive, which gave me a somewhat unrealistic view of the world of crime. There were Good Guys and there were Bad Guys and it was very easy to distinguish between the two because the good guys were smart and witty and clean-shaven, while the bad guys smoked cigarettes, needed to shave, talked nasty, wore dark clothing and ended up in jail. It never occurred to me when I was a kid, that people who ended up in jail might not all be Bad Guys, that is, in some instances they were relatively good guys who made very bad decisions and choices in their lives. It took my working in the Yavapai County Jail to bring that realization to light for me, and while this education was taking hold, I ran into quite a few fascinating people along the way. People who wore orange uniforms and occasionally handcuffs on their wrists. People known as Inmates.

Truth or consequences

2009-08-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

The dreaded polygraph begins....

*Now have always considered myself to be a rather decent person. I have never robbed a bank, killed my neighbor or set cats on fire, and if anyone were to be asked about my ethics I would probably earn an A-minus. None of this matters when you are strapped into a big, leather and wood chair that resembles Ol’ Sparky in the movie The Green Mile with bands and sensors hooked to various areas of your body. Instantly your blood pressure rises and as the polygraph examiner stoically tells you not to think about all the little things you have done in your life that is exactly what you think about. There was the quarter I stole from the collection plate in Sunday School at age six, the lipstick I shoplifted from the neighborhood drug store at age eleven, and the four hundred and six pencils, paperclips and personal copies I have unthinkingly pilfered from my employers over the past thirty years all began to tumble through my brain. That’s just how it is; someone tells you not to think about a purple elephant and immediately you envision a two hundred pound, toe-dancing, lavender pachyderm in your mind. No way around it.

It occurred to me after it was all over that the polygraph examiner probably knows and expects you to think about all your transgressions. It’s part of having a conscience and that is really what they are looking for. So when he throws questions out such as: have you ever had sex with an animal? Or have you ever consciously caused bodily harm to another person? He probably already knows the answers and would only be shocked if the needle leapt off the page. At the time that is not apparent, though, and my mind was racing. Does he mean a literal animal or does he mean the crazy idiot I dated briefly last year? It was not a fun experience and caused me a lot of soul searching but I doubt the polygraph examiner cared about that. He just kept jotting down little notes and nodding and making mmm-mmm sounds while the needle kept moving along.

An interesting point about a polygraph, at least the polygraph they administered in my case, was that they asked five basic questions, each one of them in a hundred different ways. Do you use, produce or sell drugs? Are you a thief? Do you abuse kids or enjoy kinky sex? Are you a bully? Are you whacko? (Whacko is a legitimate medical term I picked up from one of the psychologists at the jail, and I trusted that he would know ). They have so many ways of asking the same five questions it is really amazing, and you don’t realize they are asking those same five questions until the whole thing is over.

I happened to go to a private art college about a mile or so from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965-66, just the time when all the anti-war, love, peace and drugs-for-all culture was at its peak. It was extremely interesting to me and I watched with amazement all the sit-ins, lay-downs, marches, fights and such, while reading the underground newspapers with an insatiable appetite. I even watched in horror as a young girl, under the influence of a very good LSD trip, tried to fly off one of the quad buildings and ended up by killing herself - something I have never gotten out of my mind’s eye to this day.

I attended a few parties where the air was so thick with the sweet smell of burning hemp it almost gagged you, and I watched students dancing in merry abandon after consuming some innocent looking homemade brownies, all the while thinking to myself that my Ozzie & Harriet parents would be aghast if they knew the world I was experiencing. I had been brought up differently. I loved and respected my country and would never protest a war, I got my high from surfing and did not need drugs, while rules and laws were there for the good of mankind and were never to be broken. Challenged, perhaps, but never blatantly broken. My parents had no idea what was going on around me in my safe, private little art school.
I have never, in spite of all my experiences before and since, ever tried drugs. Not even marijuana. In fact, I never have even tried a cigarette. It had nothing to do with being a good girl or respecting the laws. It was because I just wasn’t interested. I had a lot of fun just being me, and the goofy things my friends and I did (like running through the old graveyard above the college at midnight) were plenty exciting enough to keep my adrenalin up and pumping. I didn’t particularly care about what was “cool” and it seemed to me that the kids who kept themselves high spent most of their time staring at their fingers or flopping around on the grass. I had better things to do.

The point I am getting to is that the polygraph examiner must have asked me the drugs question a gazillion ways and times, each time enunciating the question a bit more carefully, as if I had not heard him correctly. Finally, after trying to catch me in a fib about my assumed drug use, he paused and asked me: “Do you mean to tell me you went to college up at Berkeley in 1966 and you have never tried a drug?”

I think I shrugged and gave him my best look of annoyance, “Does the machine say I am lying?” I asked.

The polygraph examiner made one of those sounds like he had an avocado seed stuck in his throat and marked something on the exam strip, “No!” he mumbled, and then went on. Whether or not he was convinced I had never tried an illegal drug is still unknown to me. He must have, though, because he passed me on the polygraph. Of course, it’s possible he just assumed I was a pathological liar.

stay tuned.....

In the beginning

2009-08-16T21:32:00.000-07:00

About three years before I retired I began to read back over hundreds of pages of notes I had kept during my career, thinking about the people I had known and worked with and around, chuckling at some of the memories, shedding tears at others. All the events in my memories are true, but all the names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. After all, you know who you are...right?

The inmate kite was rumpled, stained with something brown (coffee, I hoped) and lying on the floor next to the Sergeant’s desk. The handwriting resembled that of my four-year-old grandson’s and it read: “Need to see psike havng flashis and exploshuns in my brane.” It was not the first inmate kite (request form) I had ever read and certainly not the most interesting, but there was a moment’s hesitation when I wondered if I should call out the bomb squad. It made me pause in my day’s duties to think back on all the multitudes of requests from all the hundreds of inmates I have mused over during the past fourteen years. Everything from explosions in their brains, phone calls to the Governor and marriage proposals, it has run the gamut. I have met and worked with literally every type of human being with every known mental and personality disorder, addiction, phobia, paranoia and just plain rotten luck that could be imagined. To date I have been pretty much unscathed by it all and don’t regret a single day of my career, but if someone were to ask me, on the day of the Exploding Brain kite, why I had become a Detention Officer and what I got from it, I would have had trouble explaining.

I was forty two years old the winter it began, newly divorced and freshly relocated from the suburbs of Southern California to the mountains of Prescott, Arizona, without a clue on earth as to what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I had taken a job at one of the small, local newspapers doing graphic art and designing advertising just to pay my living expenses. My background, education and degree were all in the arts after all, and I had so far managed to keep my head above water doing newspaper ads. It was poverty level living, but respectable work. The problem was there was no future in it, no benefits and no real security, plus the fact that doing advertising layouts day after day tended to take the creative edge off of my spirit. I really was tired of it.

That was when I read the ad in the “other” local paper: “Detention Officers needed. Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office. No experience necessary. $17,350 yr. Full benefits. Women & minorities urged to apply.” That was what got me at first: women urged to apply! I could do that. I was a woman. And I fit the second requirement, as well; I had no experience whatsoever. That was two of the criteria without even trying! The third qualification I had was that I really could use $17,350 a year in wages, plus benefits. I was making a whopping $6.00 an hour at the paper which amounted to $12,480 a year if I took no sick days or vacations. It was not a big decision to make. I had nothing to lose. I applied.

Back in those days (1989) the hiring process for a Detention Officer was not really all that complicated: background questionnaire, note from a doctor saying you had a heart beat and some level of blood pressure, and an oral board of assorted people from the jail itself who wanted to know why I thought I would make a good Detention Officer. I really had no idea how to answer that question because I did not even know what a Detention Officer did, but I was always good at bluffing. I loved essay tests in school because I could write pages on a subject without ever saying anything incriminating. It seemed to me that telling this oral board my real qualifications - that I needed the pay and the benefits - would not sit well with them so I bluffed. I told them how I wanted to have a career with some meaning, to do something for the community, yada, yada, yada. It must have worked because they bought it. Years later I came to find out my bluffing tactics were totally unnecessary. Most of the people who applied to work in the jail were after the same thing: pay and benefits. At any rate, they evidently saw some redeeming feature in me because they told me I had passed the oral boards and now came the last step of the hiring process: the dreaded Polygraph.

** Hang onto your seats...more to follow!**