PART II SWAMP COUNTRY #4
Watched by the man in the Chevy, we went inside the prison.
Angola is home to Louisiana’s Death Row.
A few dozen prisoners are incarcerated there as they await -execution, among them the multiple murderer, Cyrus Barbin.
It was on Cyrus’s body that I first saw the image of the triple--forked tree.
Audrey and I stepped up to the Visitors Affairs counter. The guard in charge was a morbidly obese man who lazily chewed tobacco behind bulletproof glass.
We asked to see Cyrus.
The Visitors Affairs man recited the prison’s policy in a bored singsong voice, ‘Absent a court order, the prisoner in question has to approve any visitors.’ He added with a sly grin: ‘And Old Cyrus, he don’t see anyone. Hasn’t let anyone come talk to him in years.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Please tell Cyrus that “Mr Rainsford has come to see him in Cyrus’s capacity as General Zaroff”. See if he’ll meet us then.’
A junior guard was sent away with the message and came back shortly after with a puzzled expression on his face.
‘Barbin said to send them in.’
The Visitors Affairs man snorted. ‘Whatever. No phones, no cameras, no weapons. You can claim ’em on your way out. Officer Higgins here’ll take you down to the Hilton. You wanna see Cyrus? Fuck. Be careful what you wish for.’
Going into a prison—any prison, let alone a supermax like Angola—is an unnerving experience.
When those steel bolts shoot home behind you, you really know you’re locked in with a population of human beings capable of terrible things and you’re separated from them at times by only a few thin bars.
To get to Death Row at Angola, you have to pass through D Block.
As Officer Higgins led Audrey Mills and me past D Block’s many cells, the entire cell block erupted in whistles and catcalls.
‘Hey, beautiful, wanna come in here and spin on my dick?’
‘Whoa, sweetheart. You are fine! I just wanna cum all over your face!’
Audrey kept her eyes fixed forward, never acknowledging the shouts.
I imagined visiting a prison was more frightening for a woman, but if Audrey was rattled by the lewd shouts and threats, she didn’t show it. It was impressive.
But then another voice rose above all the others: ‘Yo, Sam Speedman, you little four-eyed fuck!’ (Tally update: 116.)
I turned.
Curtis Wayne Gardner glared at me from a cell to my right.
I had put him here two years ago when I’d discovered that Curtis had hired a hit man to kill his business partner for the insurance. Curtis got 25 years, as did the hit man.
(This is an occupational hazard for any private investigator visiting a prison: you might encounter someone you yourself put there. It’s happened to me before.)
‘Hello, Curtis.’
‘When I get out of here, I am gonna find you and I am gonna rip your scrawny little head off!’
I kept walking.
There’s really nothing you can say to that.
At the far end of D Block, we came to a standard prison feature known as an ‘airlock’.
Manned by a pair of bored-looking young guards, it was essentially a right-angled connecting chamber that linked D Block to Death Row.
Leg-irons and straitjackets hung from hooks on its walls.
They looked old, almost medieval. The leg-irons were fashioned in such a way that if you wore them, you walked hunched over with tiny steps.
The first door swung open with a rusty squeal and Officer Higgins guided Audrey and me into the airlock.
Only after the first door slammed shut behind us did the -second one open.
We entered Death Row.
The guards and inmates call Death Row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary the Angola Hilton.
This is because the prisoners there are afforded certain privileges, the main one being they occupy the same cell for the entire time they are in residence, which in many cases amounts to decades.
Death Row was essentially one long hallway with cells on both sides. The lights hanging from the ceiling gave off a sickly yellow glow.
‘Cyrus is in Cell 4.’ Officer Higgins jerked his chin down the hallway.
He stayed with the two guards in the airlock as we continued on.
The place stank of sweat, body odour and semen. (Prisoners masturbate a lot.)
A figure snored in the first cell.
In the second, a grey-haired white man played chess against himself.
‘Good evening, ma’am,’ a deep voice said from the third cell.
An enormous Black man watched us from it as we passed. His voice was calm, cultured. A large wooden crucifix hung from his wall above a ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary and a pile of Bibles.
‘I am an instrument of the Lord,’ he said pleasantly, ‘the Lord who cured my sinfulness with His grace, love and wrath. My name is Dwayne Folcomb Jr, but you, ma’am, can call me the Messenger of God because I would sincerely like to cure you of your sins.
But to receive His grace, first you must feel His wrath.
I’ll make you scream in pain until you beg for mercy and accept His glorious message. ’
Beside me, Audrey never looked at him, but as we walked onward, I saw her gulp, swallowing her fear.
Cyrus Barbin was in the fourth cell.
He had been in it for twenty-one years.
He was 49 years old.
As a 28-year-old, under the light of a full moon, he had been caught hunting four homeless Black men on his property outside Mayfield, Louisiana.
Yes, hunting them. With a deer rifle.
One of the young men had managed to escape and hail down a passing truck. By the time the police arrived, Cyrus had killed the other three and was in the process of eating their hearts.
Cyrus had surrendered to the cops, smiling through bloodied teeth.
Back at the station (I’d read the transcript of the interrogation) when the cops had asked him why he’d done such a thing, he’d answered, ‘Beyond the fact that it’s my God-given fucking right as a white man? I dunno, I guess I’m like General Zaroff: bored with regular hunting.’
It was suspected he had done this before, picking up homeless men or hitchhikers under the pretence of giving them a ride, then hunting them in the swamps on his property.
He was found guilty and sentenced to death, but because of his family’s wealth, even now, twenty-one years later, his appeals were still working their way through the legal system.
(Cyrus was descended from a very old French–Louisianan -family, the Barbins, whose lineage stretched back to the 1700s, when Louisiana had been owned by the French and a Barbin had been appointed to lead the colony by King Louis XIV himself.
The Barbin family name, however, had been diminished to the point of extinction by the age-old bane of blueblood -families: daughters. Daughters who had taken the surnames of their husbands. The childless Cyrus was actually the last male of the Barbin line.)
Having been in his cell for so long, Cyrus had decorated its walls substantially.
There were no posters—the guards must have seen The Shawshank Redemption—just Cyrus’s own hand-drawn scrawls.
As we arrived at his cell we saw them.
It was impossible not to.
The three walls were covered from floor to ceiling with giant black letters:
‘our blood will not be diluted!’
‘o.r.i.o.n.’
‘you will not replace us!’
‘blut und boden!’
‘colossians 3:22 – the 11th commandment’
Cyrus Barbin slouched lazily on his bed, reading a book.
He was a tall man, well over six feet, and bald as a cue ball.
If he wasn’t in a cell in one of the worst prisons in America, you’d think we’d interrupted him reading on a summer vacation.
The book, I noted, was Mein Kampf.
He wore orange prison trousers and no shirt.
His upper body was exceedingly muscular and at the sight of it, I heard Audrey gasp softly.
This wasn’t because of his muscles (I think). It was because of his tattoos.
Cyrus’s body was covered with them.
Hundreds of them.
A mosaic of racist images ran across his torso, down his arms and up his neck all the way to the ears.
Nooses. Klan hoods. Burning crosses.
The slogans were similar to those on his walls: ‘death to jews’; ‘black hunter, white heart’; ‘o.r.i.o.n’ again, and more Bible verses.
‘What’s O.R.I.O.N.?’ Audrey whispered.
‘“Our Race Is Our Nation,”’ I said. ‘White supremacist slogan.’
I’d seen Cyrus’s tattooed body before, back when I’d interviewed him for my doctoral thesis on mass murderers twelve years earlier.
Taking pride of place on Cyrus’s chest were three larger tattoos.
The biggest was a Christian cross. It occupied the whole centre of his torso.
Flanking it on his right pectoral muscle was the Nazi swastika.
And on the other side of the cross, on his left pec, was a -tattoo of a triple-forked tree with nooses hanging from its arms, the exact same image that had been scrawled on the doll that had been found with LaToya Martyn’s baby inside it.
Cyrus still hadn’t looked up from his book.
‘Hello, Cyrus,’ I said. ‘Or would you like me to call you General Zaroff?’
That was what had got me in to see Cyrus when I’d been researching my thesis.
Having read the transcript of his police interview on the night of his capture and noting the ‘General Zaroff’ comment, I had taken a chance and said that I was Mr Sanger Rainsford.
General Zaroff was the villain of the classic short story The Most Dangerous Game and Sanger Rainsford, the hero.
In the story, General Zaroff—a gifted hunter who has grown bored of hunting animals—hunts human beings, the most dangerous game. After trying to hunt Rainsford on his remote island—spoiler alert—Zaroff is ultimately killed by Rainsford.
I think Cyrus let me see him because I was the only person who’d ever got his literary reference.
‘Mr Speedman,’ he said, his eyes still down. ‘They’re gonna kill you, you know. It’s inevitable.’
‘Who’s going to kill me?’ I said.
He looked up from his book. ‘I’m sorry. Where are my manners? I called you Mister Speedman. Is it Doctor Speedman now? Did you get your doctorate after our interview?’
‘I did. But mister is okay.’
‘And did the FBI accept you after you acquired your doctorate?’ he asked.
‘No, it didn’t. I work for myself now. I’m a private detective.’