Chapter 36
While in London, I was hoping to visit the famous detective novelist P.
D. James. Years earlier when I was writing mysteries no one wanted, I sent a few letters to her, asking for advice.
I presumptuously included a couple chapters, and she graciously replied that she couldn’t read them. But she wished me well.
My U.K. tour was the beginning of strange questions by the media as I fended for myself abroad. While on the BBC in Brighton, I was asked if I would agree to being “raped for research.”
“Why?” I said to the male interviewer. “Are you volunteering for something?”
“The governor’s not going to intervene,” Jay informed the warden.
“All right, we’re about to begin the first cycle,” he announced.
At 11:07 when they thought the inmate was dead, they realized he wasn’t.
“He’s not expired. We’re going to have to run it through another cycle,” the warden said.
“What?” Jay asked.
“It may have malfunctioned…”
This gave me the idea of what would happen to the executed inmate Ronnie Joe Waddell in my novel Cruel and Unusual.
As I continued my research, I was given a tour of the Richmond prison on Spring Street before it was torn down.
The crude wooden electric chair had been built by inmates.
A warden explained exactly what was done during an execution.
I thought about an autopsy I’d witnessed several years earlier.
While the prison was still running, all executions took place in downtown Richmond, and the bodies were delivered to the OCME directly afterward.
Usually, the autopsies took place close to midnight, the inmate dead maybe an hour when he was lifted onto one of our steel tables.
I remember the temperature of the body was 106 degrees, indicating it had been much hotter at the time of death.
What a terrible way to die, and my eyes played tricks on me as I watched the autopsy, at times touching the body.
He was so warm and limber, his veins standing out as if he was alive.
Most medical examiners and cops I knew were jaded against violent criminals.
I don’t understand how one can see brutalized victims on autopsy tables and feel much empathy for those who put them there.
I wanted to know how I really felt about capital punishment.
I couldn’t have an informed opinion unless I was familiar with the details.
In later years I would talk to three inmates on death row, facing them through thick glass.
Not one of them struck me as truthful, including Darlie Routier in Texas, convicted of stabbing her two young sons to death in 1996.
I don’t believe she did it but got the impression she was being evasive about what really happened.
I felt sorry for her but not the serial killer ángel Maturino Reséndiz, known as the Railroad Killer.
When I interviewed him in 2003 for an ABC Primetime special, he said that whenever he was about to murder, he saw a purple aura.
Seven years later, I would meet Christa Pike, the youngest woman sentenced to death in the U.S.
In 1995 at the age of eighteen, she tortured and murdered a Job Corps classmate, carving a pentagram into her chest and keeping a piece of her skull.
I interviewed Christa in 2010 at the Tennessee Prison for Women and she enjoyed the attention, seeming without a conscience.
I was told that while in maximum security she tried to strangle another inmate with a shoelace.
In 2001, I witnessed the execution of Robert William Clayton in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’d been convicted of brutally murdering nineteen-year-old Rhonda Kay Timmons in 1985. A groundskeeper at her apartment complex in Tulsa, he’d noticed her sunbathing in front of her unit while her husband was at work.
Robert Clayton forced her into the apartment and tried to rape her.
When she resisted, he strangled her with the top of her swimsuit, beating and stabbing her.
I sat with her mother and stepfather as Clayton died by lethal injection.
What I remember most are the ugly faces he made through the glass partition separating him from the witnesses.
He denied his crime until the end and was hateful.
I could imagine him murdering Rhonda and believing she had it coming.
When the lethal drugs rushed through his veins, his face turned blue as he asphyxiated, his diaphragm heaving.
While this was going on other inmates in the prison were kicking their cell doors.
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
With each one, the mother, Pat Bullard, saw Robert Clayton stabbing her daughter. Again, and again.
“It was the first time I saw her die,” Pat later told me. “Prior to that I’d never envisioned it.”
During the execution, she gripped my hand and prattled silly jokes as if she were a five-year-old. After it was over, she apologized, saying it was her way of coping. I asked if the death of her daughter’s murderer was closure.
“I hate that word,” Pat said. “There’s no closure except that he’s not in our lives anymore.”
I thought about what Marcella often commented.
When someone takes out a victim, he takes out everyone around them.
The ripple effect never ends. A crime against one is a crime against all, reverberating eternally like the Big Bang.
After the execution, I sat alone in my hotel room writing in the near dark.
I tried to pinpoint what I felt during those three minutes when I watched the convicted killer die.
The honest answer is not much. I’d reviewed Rhonda Timmons’s case records and seen the photographs of her bloody dead body draped over the side of the crib with her infant son inside it.
I imagined her husband walking in and finding that.
I didn’t feel sorry for Rhonda’s killer. I was impassive as I watched him struggle for his last breath. My only concern about capital punishment is what it does to the rest of us. I have no pity for the monsters who inflict the damage I’ve seen. I couldn’t possibly.
On October 21, 1991, I flew to Los Angeles to meet Jodie Foster. She was to be interviewed onstage by Charles Champlin, and he’d promised to introduce us. Once again, I didn’t know what to wear and returned to Montaldo’s.
I bought an Escada midnight blue cashmere blazer with lime green silk lining. I didn’t want to look like I’d gone to much trouble and wore it over a T-shirt and jeans with a pair of Cole Haan basketweave loafers. Checking into the Beverly Hills Hotel, I was excited but extremely nervous.
Charles Champlin picked me up, and we drove to the University of Southern California to watch a screening of Little Man Tate that Jodie directed. That week she was on the cover of Time magazine and the auditorium was packed. Hundreds were turned away at the door.
During the intermission before her interview with Charles, he sneaked me into the stairwell where Jodie was waiting with two bodyguards.
She was dressed in a denim jacket, khaki slacks, and loafers with no socks.
I recall that she wore no jewelry or makeup.
The instant Charles introduced us I knew she hadn’t been forewarned.
She had no idea who I was or why I was there.
“Patricia’s writing novels you should know about. She has this character…,” Charles started to say as Jodie looked blank and uncomfortable.
I felt bad for her and embarrassed for me.
Charles shouldn’t have foisted me on her without checking first. He awkwardly explained about Scarpetta, but Jodie had tuned out.
I wasn’t in the stairwell with her more than two minutes and hurried back to my seat.
Afterward, Charles and I returned to the hotel.
We had drinks in the Polo Lounge, an awkwardness between us.
I began to sense he might like me a bit too much, and that might explain his wanting me to fly across the country.
Had the only objective been for Jodie and me to meet because of a possible movie, why wouldn’t he have cleared it with her earlier?
Why have me go to so much trouble and put her on the spot like that?
Charles seemed disappointed when I said I needed to turn in for the night.
During this trip, I met with film agent Diane Cairns at International Creative Management (ICM) and agreed for her to represent me. She sent Postmortem and Body of Evidence to Jodie, but she wasn’t interested. I didn’t give up, thinking she’d be great in the role, as did many of my fans.
At the end of 1991, Michael Congdon was ready to make my next deal, this time for two books.
I asked if he could get me a million dollars.
He worked out the numbers while riding the subway and said he didn’t think my request was feasible.
He would sell the U.S. rights to All That Remains and Cruel and Unusual for $700,000.
By the spring of 1992, I thought it best if Michael and I didn’t work together anymore.
I was grateful for all he’d done but felt I’d outgrown his agency.
I needed a big thinker, and Diane Cairns recommended ICM’s Esther Newberg, describing her as a super-agent, and a legend.
The New York Post called her “one of the most powerful agents in the literary world.”
I met her for the first time that summer at Michael’s restaurant on West 55th Street.
I told her it was cheeky to pick a place with the same name as the agent I’d fired.
Of course, that wasn’t the reason we were having lunch there.
But it would be in character for her to do something like that, I’d discover.
In due time I’d see that Esther could be quite intimidating, nothing warm and fuzzy about her on the surface.
She doesn’t back down from a fight and isn’t one to cross.
But she’s honest, incredibly smart, and more sensitive than she lets on.
She told me she’d read the manuscript of my third Scarpetta novel, All That Remains.