Redemption (27 page)

Windows

n the early summer of 1993, it rained hard in Missouri. The rain was fine with me. I was already feeling down because it was almost July 4, the date that haunted and shamed me. I relived all my nightmares on that day.

As it turned out, I was too busy on the fourth to freak out. On July 3, Old Renz flooded, and we had to evacuate the building in a hurry. Officers woke us up in the middle of the night and told us to pack a pillowcase and a laundry bag with all of our essentials. We were being transferred—all five hundred of us. A few buses and vans pulled up. We got on the buses while our stuff got on the vans.

We arrived at Church Farm State Prison near Jefferson, Missouri. They unloaded us into the gym. I walked in with my friends, and we claimed our cots. Women were jammed in everywhere on rows and rows of cots. We’d been separated on different wings before, but all of a sudden, we shared one not-so-big room.

Tensions ran high. I felt like I was living in a bad-ass prison movie for a minute. There was no structure, and I was completely uncomfortable.

Everyone was running low on supplies, and people I had never talked to before were asking me for things. I always said no, and I never borrowed so much as a tampon from anyone who wasn’t my friend. My group piled everything together and shared with each other. We never loaned out our stuff, and we tried to stay independent of the drama all around us.

A game called two-for-one is big in prison. If you run out of something, you go borrow it and you have to pay it back double. Nothing good ever came out of two-for-one. I stayed far, far away from it.

But I did get caught up in racial dilemmas. We’d never had anything like that before. Black girls and white girls stuck to their own, but we didn’t fight. That is, not until we arrived at Church Farm.

My problems came to a head when a black clique ganged up to kick my ass. Their group had completely taken over one of two large bathrooms—the only one with hot water in the shower. I didn’t realize what was going on, and I walked right into their restroom and took a shower.

When I came out, four women were ready to jump me.

Jennifer came to my rescue. She ran up to the leader of their group, a woman named Clarisse. Jennifer made the case that I didn’t know. I hadn’t done anything on purpose. Clarisse said they didn’t like me because I trespassed and also because I kept to myself. But she took mercy on me and called off the ass kicking. She told her friends to leave me alone and find someone else to pick on.

I had never been so relieved. You’d best believe I went to the bathroom with the cold showers from then on. Soon after that, the prison officials got us out of the gym. We moved into the men’s work dorm, and they tried to make life more normal for us. We had wings and cells and more of the living conditions we were used to. We were just crowded, and Church Farm was older than Old Renz.

Everything about Church Farm was gross. The men were still on the property, but they had been sent to the other side, so we didn’t mix with them. Those guys kept their facility filthy dirty. It’s the inmates who are responsible for cleaning and caretaking, after all. The guards and officers just stand around and watch; we prisoners are the ones who run the prison. The Church Farm men didn’t care how they lived.

Meanwhile, Renz was still flooded. The situation was so bad that the facility was finally condemned. We were disappointed that we would never live there again.

But we did go back. In shackles and handcuffs, we got put on a bus back to Renz to collect our belongings. We had to climb through mud and water, and pack up all of our stuff in garbage bags. The smell was moldy and awful. Some people’s stuff was completely ruined, but I lived on the second floor, so my belongings were fine. Our stuff was delivered to us in the dorms at Church Farm two weeks later, and we tried to get into a routine.

Many women had lost their stuff and didn’t have even basic items like underwear and deodorant. So the prison allowed every one of us to receive a home box—that’s when someone from the outside sent us necessities. Mom had already sent me one when I got out of Gumbo, so I didn’t ask her for anything. I asked Tom W. if he’d get some things together for me.

He said he didn’t mind doing it at all, which was sweet. I gave him a list, and he mailed me a few of his T-shirts. He also shopped for a few small sports bras. He said they were easy to find. He gave me hope and reassurance that love might still be possible for me.

Our physical separation was definitely difficult. My position was obvious. Meanwhile, he was traveling all over the world with the navy. He sent me a photo and wrote me a story about himself separated into three people: Me, Myself, and I. Each one split up to search the globe for the perfect girl. When Me, Myself, and I came back home, they had all found the same girl. That girl was me.

His love was the best thing I had going for me. The second best thing was my appeal, which I was gearing up to file with Ellen. Of course, I wasn’t sure what would happen to me, but I had a lot of hope and confidence that something good would come out of it. I often repeated my trial judge’s statement in my head: “A conventional sentence would have been more appropriate under the circumstances.” If I could just get the possibility of parole, I felt like I could get out of here one day before age sixty.

After receiving our Old Renz property, we began settling into the institution. They doled out jobs. I was told I had to work in the kitchen, and I was hot about it. I had already done yard duty, my mandatory job. I was done with entry-level, crappy prison positions. My manager didn’t care. Times had changed, and the old rules didn’t apply at Church Farm. I had to work in the kitchen from 4 to 11 a.m. At least Big Faye was not there. She had gone home.

I never ate in the dining hall. I used all my money to buy food from the canteen, like frozen pizza. I hated the dining hall. I had to wear state grays and a gross hairnet. The kitchen stunk like rotting food and bleach. Add to that, I didn’t know how to cook anything more than a box of Hamburger Helper.

I was assigned pots and pans. I hated washing dishes with a passion. The kitchen manager, Dennis, was pretty cool. I told him I didn’t know how to cook, and I’d be damned if I was going to wash a dish.

“It’s just not going to happen,” I said.

He didn’t like what I said, but he listened. He gave me the job of opening big industrial-size cans of food with this huge industrial can opener. You lower down the can, put the blade into place, and crank a large handle around to open a can of green beans that would feed a hundred people. Once I opened the cans, I’d pour the contents into a big pan and deliver it to the cook. I’d pull onions and potatoes from the storeroom. My job was called the runner. I got the cooks what they needed.

The storeroom had a surprise in it for me—a small window that opened up to the outside. This window had no screens and no bars.

I told Dennis I couldn’t be a runner anymore. “I can’t do this job,” I said. “I have life without parole, and you’re asking too much of me to go near that window every day.”

He told me, “Tough. Deal with it.”

I went to Jennifer about it. I told her Dennis needed to take me out of the kitchen immediately. The temptation to try to escape was just too much for me to handle.

“This is fucking nuts,” I said. “There’s a window there that leads to freedom. I have the most time here, and they put me in that room.”

“Shut up,” Jennifer said. “In two weeks, we’re going through that window.”

My heart raced. I wanted nothing more than to be free. I wanted some sort of life back. But I never lost my sense of right and wrong. I knew going AWOL was a bad idea. While it’s hard to punish someone sentenced to life without parole—they couldn’t just tack on time if they caught me jumping the fence—an attempted escape doesn’t look good during the appeals process.

I thought about it long and hard. I talked to Mom about it during one of our visits. She and John had moved back to the St. Louis area by this time and were living in Edwardsville, Illinois. It was a few hours away from Church Farm, and she visited me about once a month. Not all of our visits went well, but that didn’t matter. She still showed up.

This time, I told her everything. I told her I’d need a source of money if I left. I asked her what I should do. She cried. She said I was going through my first appeals, and I needed to think about that. She asked, “What kind of freedom are you going to have? You’ll always be on the run. I’ll never see you again, and I need you in my life.”

I didn’t cry, but I took her words to heart as my friends Jennifer and Vicky plotted their escape plan. I had a huge battle with myself.
Should I stay, or should I go
? In the end, I told Jennifer and Vicky I didn’t want to go, but if they needed anything from me, I’d help them.

On the big day, I had to report to work at 4 a.m. Vicky, who also worked in the kitchen, was going to start her shift as usual. She was supposed to wait for Jennifer to go through the breakfast line. Jennifer would be wearing her grays; when she came through the line with her tray, she’d find a hairnet for her behind the big milk container. So the two of them would walk into the kitchen as if they worked there—no one would even notice—and pop out that window.

Jennifer grabbed the hairnet and walked into the kitchen at 5:30 a.m. Vicky wasn’t there. She had already left at 4 a.m.

The storeroom window opened with a little V hinge. Vicky had already taken a broom handle to it and busted it all the way out. The window was wide open when Jennifer climbed on a bucket, slid through it with a little push from me, and dove out into the yard at Church Farm. Then she hopped the fence.

I was a little stunned and numb. It was hard for me to stay put in that kitchen I hated while my friends took their freedom into their own hands. But it was a turning point for me, too. I told myself, “Whatever happens to me, happens. God doesn’t want me to hop out of that window.”

I looked to God because I was tired. I had strayed and smoked pot; I had helped them hatch their escape. And, of course, I had done far worse than that, or I wouldn’t have been at Church Farm in the first place. I was starting to come to terms with myself and who was to blame for my situation. I was to blame, and more than anything else, I wanted to make things right if that was still possible. I had tried doing things my own way, and it was time for me to step back and let God take over. I wanted to stop feeling so bad for what I’d been through and what I’d done. I hoped that one day, someone in this world would say that they understood. That couldn’t happen if I continued to make wrong choices. The Bible says, Come to me all who are weary, and I will give you rest. I was weary. I placed my worries on Him. I asked for forgiveness over and over again. I searched; I thought; and I found peace in my decision. Though years later, on bad days, I would think to myself,
Damn, maybe I should’ve gotten out of there when I had the chance
.

At 7 a.m., we had count. Then the guards knew Jennifer and Vicky were gone. They locked down the entire institution. They put out an all-points bulletin (APB) and called the Missouri Highway Patrol.

They asked me several times if I knew anything. Officers wanted to know if Jennifer and Vicky had given me money or drugs to help them out that window. They even made me pee in a cup, and it came back clean. They wanted to know where my friends got money from—you can’t escape without money. They wanted to know who was picking them up. I told them I knew nothing, no matter how much they harassed me. Not snitching felt like the right thing to do, plus it gave me a good reputation.

Within four hours, officers had collected both of my friends and put them in custody. Their ride on the outside never showed up—he decided he didn’t want to be their ferry to freedom.

I saw the police bring them through security in handcuffs. Jennifer and Vicky went directly into the hole. When you escape, you automatically go to the hole for one year. Church Farm’s hole was co-ed, so my friends stayed there for only one week. Then they got transferred to the hole at Chillicothe, the nearby women’s minimum security prison.

All the long-timers—like me—were immediately fired from kitchen duty because that window was still wide open. They finally decided that, yes, there was a security risk in the storeroom. I was happy to be fired; it was fine with me. Three days later, they woke us up in the middle of the night. They called a few names, mine and Sabrina’s included, and told us to pack. We were getting transferred to Chillicothe, too. They did it at night because the phones were off, and we had no way of letting anyone on the outside know we would be out. They didn’t want any more escapes. We were going somewhere more structured; Church Farm provided too many opportunities for trouble.

Chilli

hillicothe was a cool new place. It was like a day-care facility compared to Church Farm and Old Renz. I never thought I’d get the chance to be at a minimum security prison, especially this one. Chilli was known as the resort of Missouri prisons. Meanwhile, the guards must’ve figured minimum was better than no security, which was the situation at Church Farm. Whatever the thinking, I was glad they decided to move me.

Chilli didn’t even have razor wire around the fence. It had real rooms, not cubicles. There were no open wings where women could constantly spy on each other. We were allowed to sit outside all day long if we wanted to, not two hours in, then two hours out like at Old Renz. I could actually play tennis outside on real tennis courts. It was such a nice facility. Plus, I ran into old friends from everywhere at Chilli.

Sabrina was in a completely different housing unit—I was on 5, and she was on 2. We both put in requests to be in the honor dorm. We had both been infraction-free for one year, so we were eligible.

I took a three-mile walk every day when I wasn’t working, and the weather was nice. I had an AM/FM Walkman. I didn’t get good reception on my radio outside, only inside, so I used a blank tape to record songs off the indoor radio, and then I’d pop it into my Walkman while I cruised along the field. I could pretend I was free for those few precious moments. I could feel free in my own clothes. At Chilli, we were allowed to own twenty-four tops and twenty bottoms, including shorts. Of course, I had many more outfits than that—we all did. I had different kinds of T-shirts and jeans to wear on a daily basis. I only had to wear my prison uniform at work and during visits. Under the circumstances, things couldn’t have been much better.

My job was cosmetology clerk, and I made $50 a month. There was a cosmetology school where offenders were trained to cut hair. Most of us went there to get our hair done. Some of the cosmo clerks before me used to take bribes in exchange for appointments with the best haircutters. My boss advised me not to do that. I liked my job, and I didn’t want to get fired. But if my friends wanted their hair done, I’d do them favors. A woman might come up to me and tell me she was having a visit on Saturday, and could I get her on the list? If I liked her, I’d say, “Sure.” If I didn’t like that person, I’d say, “I’ll see what I can do.”

That’s the thing about prison. If I needed something, I never went to the staff. I counted on the other inmates. In every department, we ran the place. The officers just stood around and watched.

A woman named Tanya Goings also lived in the honor dorm. She had heard about me and she knew I stayed out of trouble. So when her roommate left, she asked me to move in. I said yes immediately. I had been living with a tiny girl named Too Short who never had any money and was constantly eating my food. Too Short wasn’t all there. I needed to make a switch. Before long, Sabrina made her way into the honor dorm, too, and she lived across the hall. Honor dorm was cool. We could have our own sheets, comforters, curtains, and rugs.

Tanya was great, and we immediately became really good friends. She was about fifteen years older than me, and she was like a sister. She was in for murder. She had been involved in a love triangle and had killed her girlfriend’s husband. Tanya was gay. She was self-assured, respected, and kind. I liked to make fun of her sandy blond Farrah Fawcett haircut and her outdated 1980s glasses. Sometimes, you get stuck in the moment you went into prison, and that was definitely the case for Tanya. The styles changed, but she didn’t.

Tanya did all the cooking and cleaning in our nice, private room in exchange for my taking the top bunk. My lazy butt didn’t mind. Tanya had done eight years already, and she knew how to cook all kinds of things. The honor dorm had a refrigerator. We could buy three Tostino’s frozen pizzas a week and actually store them. Each woman was allowed to buy one box of Tyson fried chicken, two burritos, and other stuff per week. My friends and I—Tanya, Sabrina, and some others—would buy our limit of food and share. We pitched in to have Sabrina’s pizza on Monday, my chicken on Tuesday, someone else’s pizza on Wednesday, and so on. We felt like a family, and we had a lot of fun.

Tanya’s job was institutional activities coordinator. She had access to free hygiene supplies, and she’d come home with free soap, razors, and shampoo that she shared with everybody. She had a heart of gold and made me laugh all the time.

The doctors at Chilli told me it was time for my annual Pap smear. I reminded them that I’d just had one during R&O less than a year before. But they’d lost the paperwork, so I had to go through a whole new gynecological exam. When the results came back, they showed some abnormal cells. The doctors didn’t really tell me what was going on; they just called me back in and did a biopsy. A few weeks after that, in January of 1994, I found out I had an early stage of cervical cancer. Medical informed me that I would need treatments—cryotherapy—which they’d do in about four weeks.

I couldn’t believe it. I was unusually skinny, but that was my only symptom. I just couldn’t keep weight on no matter how hard I tried, and I wasn’t hungry. I was shocked. How could I be twenty-two years old with cancer?

I told my friends, who were sympathetic. I also had to call my mom. I was allowed to make collect calls. I started crying as soon as I heard her voice.

I said, “I have cancer!” I thought I was so strong—I worked out all the time, and I didn’t do any drugs or alcohol. And there I was: sick.

“I can’t believe this,” Mom said. “My baby! This on top of everything else.” She sobbed during the whole conversation.

She came up for a surprise visit that weekend. They called me in my room and said to come down, so I threw on my uniform and put my hair back.

“Why are you here?” I asked, knowing she’d just driven three hours to Chillicothe. For once, I was really glad to see her.

“Because I just needed to be with you,” Mom said. John was by her side.

Their support meant the world to me. They were showing me that when things got bad, they would care enough to come find me. Mom and John might not have been much, but they were all I had. They were stepping up.

I had another visitor around that time. My attorney, Ellen, came by to let me know my appeal had been denied. I had cancer, and I had lost my first appeal. I was no longer living it up at my new home in Chillicothe. Reality was starting to sink back in. I felt completely defeated, and a new sadness overwhelmed me. The words
life without parole
became more real. I had been denying that prison would actually be my life, the rest of my life.

Ellen explained the complicated legal reasons why the appeal was denied.

“Stacey, your appeals are always going to be denied,” she said.

I didn’t want to cry in front of her. I tried to stay strong. I don’t like to wallow in problems; I like to fix them.

“So what’s next?” I asked.

“We can put together a clemency package.” Ellen was always very gentle with me. She was businesslike and lawyerly, but she seemed to actually care about my case. She had long sandy brown hair that was always beautiful and she wore blue suits. She often visited me pregnant. Throughout the years she worked with me, Ellen had four kids.

She explained that the governor grants a clemency. An advisory board could recommend my case to him. Then he would decide whether to grant me a reprieve or a commutation of my sentence. We would have to write a convincing clemency package. I would need to write out everything that happened to me, how I’d tried to repent for the crime, and what my plans were for the future. I would need to find others to write glowing recommendations. I would need to prove the allegations of sexual abuse in the package. She would write the legal parts.

We had time. Clemencies are granted only every four years—sometimes eight—when a governor is about to leave office.

I told her to sign me up.

Part of me lost hope when I lost the appeal, and another part of me wanted to buck up and fight. Either way, my legal issues were only going to get more complicated. It wasn’t fair for me to keep stringing Tom W. along.

If I had come home on that appeal, I probably would’ve been with him. I could see myself marrying him. But the years were passing, and I was still sitting on life without parole. I cared so much about him. I loved him and needed him in my life. But this situation wasn’t fair to him. And it hurt me, too.

He came up for a visit, and we had a discussion about us. We had said from the beginning that if my appeal didn’t free me, we should break up. Not that we were literally together, of course. But we lived with the hope that we could be a couple. Now our hopes were dashed. It was time to be realistic. He was disappointed and upset at this visit, but he agreed. We needed to just live our separate lives for a little while. We needed to try to forget about each other.

We were able to sit outside under a tree. There weren’t any officers around, and he held me and kissed me while I cried. I had visions of us hanging out on some back porch after a long day of work, but picket fences were not in our future. Instead, we were surrounded by wire fencing, sharp and cutting. We said good-bye gently and kindly.

I wanted him to have the opportunity to meet someone, fall in love, and have kids. He just wasn’t going to be able to do those things with me. We didn’t call or write for at least a year after that.