HUNTSVILLE - As he lay strapped to the gurney and the drugs flowed into his veins, the prisoner began to sing. "Si-i-lent night ..."

Mike Graczyk stood behind a barred plexiglass window, taking notes. Since 1984, as part of his job, the Associated Press reporter from Houston has seen the state put to death more than 200 inmates by injection.

Each execution is efficient, tidy, quick.

Unforgettable.

"You're at midnight Mass on Christmas and everyone around you is singing Silent Night, enjoying the

holiday moment," Graczyk said.

But whenever he hears the carol, it is Oct. 7, 1998, again. Graczyk sees the turquoise walls of the death chamber. He sees the warden. The chaplain. The pale face of a double murderer, starkly illuminated beneath the fluorescent lights, arms spread, forming a cross.

Jonathan Nobles, 37, is still singing, a microphone above his lips.

"Moth-er and child ..."

They are the killer's last words.

Christmas comes once a year, but crime and capital punishment in Texas are ongoing. This week, three more convicted murderers are scheduled to be transported 40 miles from Death Row in Livingston to the state prison in Huntsville, a red brick fortress known as "the Walls."

Tuesday: Billy Frank Vickers, 58.

Wednesday: Kevin Lee Zimmerman, 42.

Thursday: Bobby Lee Hines, 31.

Hines went to Death Row at age 19. He repeatedly stabbed a young Dallas woman, Michelle Wendy Haupt, with an ice pick and strangled her with a cord.

His execution would be the 27th in Texas this year.

Jim Willett is a former senior warden of America's busiest death house. Personable and polite, the silver-haired family man, who bears a resemblance to former major league baseball manager Tommy Lasorda, presided over 89 executions from 1998 to 2001. One was a woman, Betty Lou Beets.

Speaking of the death penalty, Willett said: "The last poll I saw, 84 percent favored it. I don't think they'll ever get rid of it in Texas unless the Supreme Court makes us.

"Texans are basically saying there are certain things, if you do, we're going to try and kill you for it. That's just the way it is."

A town and its prison

In the 1990 Rating Guide to Life in America's Small Cities, Huntsville ranked No. 1 in Texas.

"Whether you've come for a day or a lifetime, we are glad you are here," says the Web site for the Huntsville-Walker County Chamber of Commerce.

This small college community in Southeast Texas about 70 miles north of Houston, population 35,000, is the home of Sam Houston State University and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the town's largest employer.

Hershey, Pa., is known for chocolate. Huntsville is synonymous with prison and executions. The visitors center provides a driving-tour map for those interested in the area's seven prison units, including the oldest and most famous, which is near the downtown square. Since 1924, every Texas execution -- totaling 674 -- has taken place behind its 32-foot-high walls.

Across the street from the 154-year-old big house is a small hamburger stand. A sign outside advertises the "Killer Burger," a $4.25 sandwich made with double meat, double cheese and jalapeño peppers.

One of Huntsville's five museums drew 23,000 visitors last year. The Texas Prison Museum houses, among other artifacts, historical photographs, a ball and chain, and a collection of weapons confiscated from inmates.

A copy of a 1934 handwritten letter from Clyde Barrow, of Bonnie and Clyde, thanks Henry Ford for making such "dandy" getaway cars. Barrow wrote, "I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one."

Barrow served two years (1930-32) for robbery at the Eastham prison farm, about 20 miles northeast of Huntsville.

The museum's Mona Lisa is "Old Sparky," the Texas electric chair. Built by inmates, the high-backed relic looks like a medieval throne. A guardrail separates visitors from the polished oak device but hasn't prevented some from taking a seat where 361 people died. The chair is now equipped with an alarm.

Willett, 54, is the museum director. Every day, he is thankful to be out of the execution business.

"I tried to treat them as good as they would let me. I didn't baby them, but I tried to give them a decent last day," Willett said. "There were never any easy ones. For me it never got to where it was just a piece of work. I wouldn't wish it on anybody."

In the year 2000, Willett presided over 40 executions, the most by any state in one year in U.S. history. Seven inmates were put to death within 16 days that January. The month, he said, left him emotionally exhausted.

Like some others charged with carrying out the grim task, the warden sometimes questioned what the state was doing in the name of justice.

"I understand why people say we need it and why some say it's not right," Willett said of capital punishment. "My question is why we have so many more executions than other places. I don't know."

In Texas, capital offenses are: murder of a public safety officer or firefighter; murder during kidnapping, burglary, robbery, aggravated sexual assault, arson or obstruction or retaliation; murder for remuneration; murder during a prison escape; murder of a correctional employee; murder by a state prison inmate who is serving a life sentence for any of five offenses (murder, capital murder, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault or aggravated robbery); multiple murders; and murder of a person under 6 years old.

Thirty-six percent of the 65 executions in the United States so far this year took place in Huntsville.

On execution day, Warden Willett would see that the prisoner received a last meal, ordered two weeks in advance. Prepared in the prison kitchen, the food is delivered on a tray to the holding cell two hours before the inmate is told, "It's time."

Cheeseburgers are the most requested meal. Many order steak, shrimp, fried chicken. Willett was surprised by the amount of food some prisoners could consume.

One inmate wanted only a jar of dill pickles. Another a bag of Jolly Ranchers candy. One asked for "Justice, Temperance and Mercy."

Many ask for nothing.

Michelle Lyons is the prison system's public information officer and a former reporter for the local newspaper, The Huntsville Item. She once asked a Death Row inmate why he didn't request a final meal.

"He told me it seemed wrong to take any offering from someone who ultimately was going to kill you," Lyons said. "That is how he phrased it."

At the end, many prisoners apologize to the victim's family and ask for forgiveness. Some defiantly profess their innocence. Some want to tell their loved ones goodbye, and others don't want their families to watch them die.

Some draw their last breath with no friends or relatives present. Buried by the state, their unclaimed bodies rest beneath the rows of small white crosses in the prisoners' cemetery.

Some go meekly. A few put up a fight. Ponchai Wilkerson was convicted of robbing and fatally shooting a Houston jewelry store clerk. On the day of his execution, he told prison officials he had a "secret." In a final act of defiance that surprised everyone, Wilkerson spit out a handcuff key as he died.

G.W. Green, who watched an accomplice kill a Montgomery County probation officer who begged for his life, said: "Let's do it, man. Lock and load." As the drugs flowed into his arm, he used a vulgarity to describe life.

Billy Hughes, who fatally shot a state trooper along Interstate 10, said, "If I am paying my debt to society, I am due a rebate and a refund."

William Prince Davis, who shot an ice cream company manager in the chest during a robbery: "What about those Cowboys?"

After each final statement, Willett removed his glasses, his subtle signal for the unseen executioner to begin.

"That's what the warden before me did," Willett said. "I did it that way, too, until near the end. I've never told anyone this, but later I got a little electric device. You can go to Radio Shack. It's about the size of a key chain. You hit a button and there's another piece of the device with a light, and the light comes on.

"I changed to that after I went back to talk to a convict one day. He was about to be executed. One of the last things I talked to them about was whether they were going to make a final statement and how would I know when it's over with. I didn't want to cut them short if they had something else to say. But I told them they should be able to do it in three or four minutes.

"When I asked the prisoner how I would know when he was through talking, he said, 'Warden, I'll just tell you to take off your glasses.' He knew what the signal was."

In 1974, Robert Excell White confessed to the machine-gun killings of three men at the Hilltop Grocery near McKinney. The former auto mechanic and two accomplices took $6 from the cash register and about $60 from the victims' wallets.

The average time a prisoner spends on Texas' Death Row is 10 1/2 years. White was in solitary confinement for a record 24 years -- 8,982 days -- before he followed the warden into the death chamber, unshackled, on March 30, 1999.

As a five-member tie-down team secured White to his deathbed, buckling eight leather straps, Willett noticed the prisoner's shoes. Buffed to a glossy shine, they looked new. But the soles appeared almost paper-thin.

"White, where did you get these shoes?" Willett asked.

The 61-year-old prisoner said they were the same pair issued to him the day he was processed and sent to Death Row.

"I've taken pretty good care of 'em, haven't I?" he said proudly.

Did the killer have a final statement?

"Send me to my Maker, warden," White said.

Willett removed his glasses.

The timetable

On Thursday afternoon, Nov. 20, Thomas Renfro stood on the sidewalk outside the Cafe Texan, which he owned during the 1970s.

Renfro, 64, grew up in Huntsville.

"When you tell people you're from here, they say: 'Oh, that's where the penitentiary is. When did they let you out?' "

He looked in the direction of the Walls.

"They got one going down tonight."

Most executions aren't front-page news. On this day, the Item published a two-column article on Page 3: Barring any last-minute stays, a man convicted of beating and stabbing to death his friend's mother and grandmother inside their home near Corpus Christi in 1993 would become the 22nd inmate executed in Texas this year. (Two more have been executed since.)

Robert Lloyd Henry beat one victim so badly that a neighbor had to identify the victim by her jewelry and clothing, the Texas attorney general's office said. Two months after the murders, Henry went to the police and confessed.

Five hours before the execution, Lyons left her office and crossed the street to the Walls unit. Part of her job is to inform reporters about the prisoner's demeanor. She found the bespectacled inmate sitting on a bunk in his cell.

Lyons asked Henry whether he planned to make a statement.

"That conversation is the hardest thing I do," she said.

"I mean, What do you say? 'Hey, what's going on?' 'How you doing?' There is nothing you can say. Usually the inmates are very gracious and friendly. Some seem to almost be looking forward to the execution because they won't be behind bars anymore.

"One man was an old biker. He was used to being out on the open road. He embraced his execution. When his time came, he started singing Robert Earl Keen's 'The road goes on forever, the party never ends ...' "

Kenneth Allen McDuff's final words were "I'm ready to be released. Release me."

Henry, 41, told Lyons he was getting rid of "this broken-down old thing," meaning his body. Many prisoners mentally detach from their physical selves. They refer to the body they are leaving as "it."

"Unlike you or me, they know exactly when they are going to die," Lyons said. "They've had a long time to think about it. They've had time to prepare, as best they can."

Shortly before 6 p.m., Lyons' office phone rang.

She escorted Graczyk and three other media witnesses into the prison, where they were searched by correctional officers. Two reporters would watch the execution with the victims' relatives. Two would follow the inmate's family into a separate viewing room.

Afterward, Graczyk often asks the victim's relatives about lethal injection.

"Their son or daughter or whatever died a horrible death, sometimes a prolonged torturous death. Yet in a matter of seconds, this guy [inmate] goes to sleep and doesn't wake up," Graczyk said. "I'll ask them: 'Does that bother you? Is that fair?' "

In anger, and in grief, some tell him the needle is too easy.

6:01 p.m.: Henry left the holding cell.

6:03 p.m.: The tie-down team strapped him to the steel gurney.

6:05 p.m.: Saline solution began flowing into each arm.

6:10 p.m.: After the witnesses walked through a small courtyard and entered the two viewing rooms, Warden Neill Hodges received the order to proceed and asked the prisoner, his head resting on a pillow, if he wished to say anything.

"No, sir," Henry replied.

He never looked at the families of his victims.

Dressed in prison whites, he turned his head toward the adjoining room where his brother and sister, an aunt and three friends huddled. He blew a kiss. He mouthed the words "Bye bye" and "I love you."

Then, "Here I go."

6:11 p.m.: As chaplain Thomas Cole rested one hand on Henry's lower right leg, the anonymous executioner administered a sedative, sodium thiopental. Pancuronium bromide collapsed Henry's diaphragm and lungs. The killer noisily expelled one final breath. Potassium chloride stopped his heart.

6:15 p.m.: In the hushed room, Warden Hodges, wearing a coat and tie, stood near the head of the gurney -- waiting, waiting -- hands clasped in front of him.

6:18 p.m.: A medical examiner entered the 9-by-12-foot chamber. He flashed a light into the killer's empty eyes and listened with a stethoscope for a heartbeat he knew was not there.

He looked at his watch.

"6:19," the doctor announced.

"6:19," the warden repeated.

As the witnesses filed out, the warden drew a white sheet over the dead man's pallid face.

A higher Power

At 6:30 p.m., a Houston kindergarten teacher stood in the darkness on a street corner outside the prison, microphone in hand. Her outrage filled the night air.

"Robert Henry should never have been executed! ... At this holiday season he was murdered at the hands of the state!"

Gloria Rubac isn't sure how many execution vigils she has attended.

"At least a hundred," she said.

Rubac doesn't keep count. Neither does Lyons.

"People ask how many I've seen. I tell them I don't know," she said. "Some think that's callous. If I did know the exact number, it sounds like I'm notching my desk."

Rubac helped organize a rally Dec. 7, 1982, when Charlie Brooks of Tarrant County became the first person in America to be put to death by injection. She was there the night Karla Faye Tucker said goodbye.

On this trip, Rubac brought Lee Bolton, a nurse and the mother of Nanon Williams, who was convicted in Houston of murder at age 17. Her son has spent 12 years on Death Row.

"Nanon was at a drug deal. He wasn't an angel," Bolton said. "Someone was shot. But the bullet wasn't from his gun."

Bolton is seeking a new trial. But for now, she places her faith in the hands of a Power that she says is greater than the judicial system and higher than the state.

"I've got a Jesus," she said. "I got a God greater than all of this. We're all going to face him one day. We're all born on death row. It's just a matter of when."

Remembering the victims

• Mitzi Nalley, 21, and Kelly Farquhar, 24, were asleep in their north Austin home in 1986 when Jonathan Nobles broke in and attacked them and Ron Ross, Nalley's boyfriend. Ross was stabbed 19 times and lost an eye but survived. Nobles said he killed the women in a drugged frenzy.

• Preston Broyles, 73, who owned a grocery store in Princeton, and his customers Gary Coker and Billy St. John, both 18, were fatally shot with a machine gun in 1974. They were killed by Robert White during a spree that began the day before in Waco, when he fatally stabbed gun collector Roy Perryman and stole the machine gun and several other weapons.

• Adonius Collier was shot to death during a 1992 drug deal in Hermann Park in Houston. Nanon Williams was convicted of the shooting, but questions were later raised about the ballistics tests when a Houston Police Department firearms examiner said the bullet from Collier's head was fired from the gun of Williams' co-defendant.

• Hazel Rumohr, 83, and her daughter, Carol Arnold, 57, were stabbed, slashed and beaten at their home near Corpus Christi in 1993. Arnold was so badly beaten that a neighbor had to identify her through her jewelry and clothing. Robert Lloyd Henry, convicted of the crime, had been a teen-age friend of Arnold's son.

SOURCES: The Associated Press, the Houston Chronicle, the Austin American-Statesman and the Corpus Christi Caller-Times


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David Casstevens, (817) 390-7736 dcasstevens@star-telegram.com

Powerful reading - thanks for sharing

__________________
They say NOBODY is perfect so just call me NOBODY

agreed

wow..rather speechless on this one lawdog. thank you for sharing.

its a different dog, smilez lmao! It's bigdog this time :-D

ooooooooo good lord---thanks novel!! *laughin*...told'ya that thing shook me up!! sorry dog...xoxox

That's a pretty sobering piece. Makes me glad that im on the outside.
As for the right of the "Last Meal" ... it's a good thing none of them asked for the warden's dog, With these guys, you never know if a cheeseburger is going to be quite enough