Infinite Hope Page 8

  “The sheriff told us all that if the media asks about your case, we’re to tell them that it’s still under investigation,” he continued.

  I knew it had been reported in the media that two suspects had been charged with the crime in the Somerville murders. Jennings went on to describe the way that Sebesta had gone over the sheriff’s head and brought in the Texas Rangers. They were the ones who’d put me in jail, not the folks from county. Up until that point, I hadn’t made much of a distinction between the different law enforcement agencies. The Rangers had played head games, local lawman Lou Larson had tried to intimidate me, and even the jailers had made things up at the bail hearing. But it seemed clear in that moment that the Rangers were driving all of it. Jennings left me with a word of encouragement: all twelve jurors would need to find me guilty if they were going to lock me away.

  Among the many practical problems that jail poses for inmates is the fact that you can do hardly anything useful with the information you get. When jailers passed on relevant nuggets or fellow inmates gave me insight on the state’s tactics, all I could do was wait for the next visit from my lawyer to try to make sense of what I’d heard. It was a couple of weeks before Dick DeGuerin was back at Caldwell to check in on me. We met in the same small office that had become our de facto war room.

  Dick started the conversation as he always did. “How are you doing, Anthony?”

  “I’m not so good, sir,” I replied. “I’m tired of being in here.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you this. I checked on the indictment, and they plan on taking you to trial on this case.”

  Frustration once again began to rise in me. “But how in the hell can they do that for something I didn’t do?” How many times had I asked this question? That’s the problem with simple questions that go unanswered. I figured I would just keep on asking until someone explained.

  “Sebesta’s a chickenshit son of a bitch, Anthony. He would try to convict a ham sandwich. Don’t you worry. I’ll prove your innocence.” I had already heard that damn ham sandwich metaphor and it was starting to irritate me.

  But I believed Dick DeGuerin. I was having a hard time proving my own innocence, especially knowing I shouldn’t have had to. If anyone in Texas could make the state see the light, it was my diminutive yet powerful attorney.

  “I need to talk to you about Roy Allen,” Dick said, shifting gears away from the particulars of my case. His tone made me suddenly uneasy. “It seems he’s having trouble getting the rest of the money together. Anthony, I can’t do my job effectively without the money that’s necessary for this kind of case. If he can’t get the money to me, the only thing I can do is to ask the judge to appoint me to your case as assigned counsel.”

  “I’m sure that Roy Allen will get the money to you, sir.”

  “Well, I’ll give him another call and see what he’s come up with.”

  I knew that trying a capital case can cost thousands of dollars in experts and investigators alone. Not even counting what Dick would expect for his time, the costs for a case like mine could stretch into the six-figure range. I didn’t want to think about the fact that the question of my freedom might come down to whether my people could raise the requisite cash.

  After our meeting, I called Momma to let her know about the financial tension with Dick. “He says that Roy Allen is having trouble with the money,” I explained.

  “What does he mean by ‘having trouble’?”

  “The worst kind. Apparently Roy hasn’t been able to come up with it all.”

  “Well, how much is he supposed to pay?” she asked.

  I didn’t know how to answer her. Sure, I knew Dick’s reputation as a trial lawyer. I’d seen his expensive shoes and suits. But I only had my jailhouse counselors (my fellow inmates) to get me in the ballpark of what a high-profile attorney like Dick DeGuerin charged his clients.

  “I think it’s about $150,000,” I finally conceded. That seemed an impossibly large sum, even for someone like Roy Allen. My mom was shocked. She had spoken with Dick a few days earlier and he’d assured her that he had everything he needed to get me out of jail. She said she would get in touch with Roy and asked that I call her back in an hour.

  I was anxious as I waited. It wasn’t much more than goodwill that had prompted Roy Allen to bankroll my legal defense fund. And $150,000 was a lot of goodwill.

  As soon as I could secure phone access again, I made the call, my anxiety mounting with each ring. When my mom finally answered, she sounded dejected as she told me about her conversation with Roy.

  “Son,” she said, “he seems to think it’s a lot of money, and he feels Dick is sandbagging on your case to get even more.”

  I started to read between the lines. “What does that mean?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

  “Roy says he doesn’t have that kind of money. He’s asked his brothers to help him, but I guess they didn’t give him anything. The long and the short of it is that he’s not going to pay Dick to defend you.”

  We were both silent as the implications of this statement hit home. “This is messed up, Momma!” I said, doing a bad job of concealing my panic. “He has the money.” It was true. Roy did have the money. He just wasn’t going to spend it on this. I was a groomsman at his wedding and a close personal confidant, but friendships have limits, especially when it comes to money, and I had found the edge of mine with Roy. I didn’t blame him; it was a huge ask. Still, I was at the end of my rope. Dick DeGuerin was my key to getting out of this mess.

  “Anthony, you just got to keep up the faith,” my mother said, as if reading my thoughts. “Everything is going to work out. Don’t let these damn folks upset you like this.”

  “Momma, doesn’t anybody understand?” I asked. “I’m the one living in this piece of shit. Every day I have to look at the messed-up food. And worse, they’re dragging my name through the fucking mud.” I apologized for my language. I was hot, and frustrated, and tired of hitting my head against a wall.

  Mom promised to call Roy Allen again, and she assured me that if he didn’t pay the legal fees, she’d quit her job—at the time she was a dorm supervisor for the Brenham State School—and cash in on her savings. She had around $20,000 in her retirement account, an amount she’d worked her entire life to save.

  “I don’t want you to do that, Momma,” I started to say, but she cut me off.

  “I think I can get my job back after I’ve been gone for six months,” she said. “Don’t worry about a thing, all right? Just keep your head up and pray to God.”

  Prison life was slow. There was plenty of time to talk to God. Most guys took the opportunity, and most got no direct relief.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve been praying. And I’m still here.”

  “Anthony,” she said, her voice filled with sudden resolve. “Pray some more.”

  My mom’s conversation with Roy Allen the next day changed nothing: it was clear he wasn’t going to cover Dick DeGuerin’s fees. He had talked about finding another attorney to represent me, but I had lost hope that Roy was going to come through with the help I needed. I tried to understand. I knew it was a lot of money. Maybe he had lost confidence in me, or in my innocence. But I was beginning to despair. It felt like a cruel joke. Dick had told me that he’d ask to be appointed to the case by the court. But I didn’t expect this would happen, as he was well beyond the price range of court-assigned counsel. And I really didn’t think he would take my case at a steep discount, not with all the demand for his services. It wasn’t long before a letter addressed to me put an end to my wondering.

  Dear Mr. Graves,

  I have informed the Judge that I will be taking myself off of your case. It seems that your friend does not have the money to retain my services, and I can no longer represent you.

  I want you to know that I believe in your innocence and I wish you the best of luck.

  Dick DeGuerin

  January 1993

  Just like that, one of the country’s
best defense lawyers slipped through my hands, despite his stated belief in my innocence. His well-wishes didn’t do much to ease the pain. Dick had understood perfectly the game the state had been playing in my case. But still he walked away.

  Meanwhile, my mom had been working on a backup plan. She told me that my brother’s girlfriend worked for an attorney in Bellville named Calvin Garvie. He had heard about my case and expressed an interest in representing me. I was relieved but unsure. I knew by this point that I needed help in navigating the uncertain waters of the Texas legal system. But I knew nothing about Calvin Garvie or his ability to guide me.

  After reaching out to Mr. Garvie to talk with him about his price for handling my case, my mom arranged for him to meet with me the following week.

  In May 1993, the attorney came up to the old Caldwell jail to pay me a visit. The officer escorted me into the small attorney-client room inside the jail where I could visit privately with him, just as I had with Dick. A short, bald black man with a round face and glasses, Calvin struck me as a bit of a nerd. He had a habit, as he talked, of putting his finger up to his glasses to push them further up his nose. I immediately felt comfortable with him.

  He might have been forty years old, not much younger than Dick DeGuerin. But Dick had been experienced in cases like mine; Calvin was green.

  Calvin must have sensed my uneasiness. He talked for a minute about his experience. He had handled many cases over the course of his career, but only one of them had been for capital murder. Even then, the case had ended in a plea bargain long before the client’s life hung in the balance.

  Despite his lack of experience, I liked Calvin. He spoke softly, his voice a welcome change from the shouting that surrounded me in my cell. Like Dick, he saw right through the holes in the state’s case. I was drawn in as he described what he considered the state’s fabrications in their case against me. His familiarity with the details of the case was reassuring. He was from close to home, I learned, and he knew some of my people, so he’d been following my predicament from the start. My mom felt comfortable with him too. Calvin Garvie wasn’t Dick DeGuerin, but by the time he left the jail that day, he’d become my new attorney.

  Calvin informed me that he wouldn’t be working the case by himself. It’s typical for attorneys to work in teams on capital cases: the time simply spent investigating a case is difficult for one person. Lydia Clay-Jackson would be sitting second-chair. I didn’t have much to go on in evaluating whether they were up to the task. Dick DeGuerin had a reputation that preceded him. Calvin Garvie did not. Then again, I was innocent, and how hard can it be to represent an innocent man?

  My mom quit the job that she’d had for more than nineteen years to cash in her retirement annuity. She gave Calvin Garvie $10,000 up front and shelled out another grand for an investigator.

  PART TWO

  TRIAL, CONVICTION, AND SENTENCING

  If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?

  —MICHAEL CONNELLY,

  The Concrete Blonde

  SEPTEMBER 1993:

  A YEAR SINCE ARREST

  NOT ALL PRISONS ARE CREATED EQUAL. While they all constrain an individual’s freedom, some make everyday life a bit more intolerable for inmates than others. The Caldwell jail was among the worst. By September 1993, my case was at a standstill. By this time I had been in jail a little over a year, long enough to experience the county’s breaking in of a new facility. On the instructions of the jailers, I packed my few belongings and waited. The transport process was far from simple. It felt like the old Texas football games, where every cop in town was on hand to help. Officers played an elaborate game of fetch, moving inmates from their cells to cars, then coming back for more. I grew increasingly impatient, watching as officers repeatedly bypassed my cell in favor of moving other inmates.

  “Hey!” I called out to Officer Steve Jennings, the one jailer who’d been kind to me during my time there. “What’s going on? I’m ready to go!”

  Steve informed me they were plucking me last, without offering an explanation. As the transfer process continued to play out, my impatience soon turned to boredom. Finally, Officer Larson approached my cell. It had been more than a year since we’d shared a high-speed ride to and from the suspect polygraph test on the night of my arrest. I had a pretty good idea of how this would go. I had watched for hours as inmates before me had been moved without incident. I had a feeling things wouldn’t go so smoothly with Larson. On his demand, I slid my hands through the pan hole of my cell door. He slapped the handcuffs on a few clicks too tight, as was his custom. Not content to stop with my hands, Larson made me get down on my knees so he could shackle my feet. It was humiliating, him treating me like a wild animal en route to the zoo. I struggled to fight through my emotions.

  Once I was loaded in the car, Officer Larson took off in his usual way, racing down side streets, the vehicle’s tires groaning as he jerked his sedan around each corner. Despite being restrained by a seatbelt, I had a difficult time maintaining my balance given the shackles. But I didn’t say a word. Officer Larson might have been tough, but I would be the bigger man in that exchange. I wouldn’t let him break me. That thought provided comfort enough.

  I survived the ride. At the new jail in Burleson County, Larson let me out of the car and had me walk, or shuffle, my way into the building. On seeing me, the jailer at the front desk did a double-take as his eyes tracked my body from top to bottom. “Lou,” he said, looking at Larson, “was it necessary to hog-tie Graves like that?”

  “I’m the one that transported him,” Larson said, unfazed by the question. “I have to do it my way.”

  “Take the damn shackles off his ankles, Lou. He’s in the building now.”

  It wasn’t often that jailers stood up for inmates, and I was happy to see Officer Larson called on the carpet. It was a brief respite from the dehumanization inflicted by the system during the transfer process. Larson had me move to a bench and kneel on it while he removed the shackles. Next he removed the handcuffs. The jailer then asked me to follow him down the hall to the shower, where I was asked to strip naked. I was told to run my fingers through my hair, lift up my testicles, turn around and bend over to spread my butt cheeks. Next I was ordered to lift my feet one at a time. Then it was on to the shower for disinfecting from lice and anything else that might have infected us in the darkness and heat of the old jail. I put on the new orange uniform I’d been assigned and was finally escorted to my new cell. The practice reminded me of how the old slave traders had sanitized their human cargo at intake ports in cities like Charleston and Savannah. Or maybe how farmers tended to livestock before the slaughter and subsequent sale. I couldn’t decide which, perhaps because it felt like a distinction without a difference. If anyone wants to feel subhuman, be completely stripped of all dignity, and be treated worse than a junkyard dog, go ahead and get arrested in Texas.

  The jail wasn’t big, but it had the things we’d need to survive day after day. There was B-grade air conditioning and heat, although the jailers set the thermostat, so there was no promise of comfort. The steel beds and benches were no more restful, but at least the metal was shiny and clean. The walls were stark white. You could tell they had just been painted. Even the halls were clean. In that sense, the new Caldwell jail represented a certain upgrade.

  My cell itself looked like a fairly large day room. There was a bunk in each corner. The living space was communal. There wouldn’t be much privacy for the four of us who shared the room, but we had gotten used to that. Each man had his own toilet, a perk we’d not been afforded in our old haunt. I inspected the desk in my corner. It was small, probably only a couple of feet wide. But it would give me a space where I could write letters to family and friends, or to my lawyer. At this point, Yolanda and I had stopped communicating. It had been a year. She was moving on with her life. Mom was still standing strong, of course, but the rest of my family and friends h
ad started to move on with their lives as well.

  None of them knew what to do, how to help me, how to stand up to Charles Sebesta and fight for my freedom, so everyone understandably supported me from a distance. The one exception was Momma, who would visit practically every week, bringing my boys with her when she could. I hated that they had to see their father in jail. It was so unfair. My boys were seven, eight, and eleven. They were victims in this situation too.

  Meanwhile, the design of the cell dictated our social interactions. An inmate in search of solitude would rest on his bed or sit at the small metal chair that accompanied his desk. When he wanted to socialize, he’d leave his area behind and pull one of the chairs from under the steel table in the middle of the room. We lived in many ways like college students in a first-year dorm, except there were no trips to the pizza parlor, no beers among friends, nothing that resembled real life beyond our little cages. Fights did break out, but the skirmishes were almost always stress-induced. We were all under pressure, so it was relatively easy to spark a fuse in someone. Most guys, though, spent the bulk of their time in their own space. There would be small tensions around the television, like when someone tried to take control of the remote. One person might want to walk around with the remote in his hand and control what’s being watched, and it caused problems but nothing serious that led to any physical altercations. The vibe was cool for me because I was the one usually walking around with the remote. I’d poll the guys to learn what the majority wanted to watch, then I’d implement it evenly so there was no conflict. Everyone felt like there was a fair-enough process most of the time. It helped keep tensions low.

  Perhaps most important to me was the phone placed right in our cell. No longer did I have to wait hours for a jailer to stretch that old house phone through the cell’s bars. The new phones were expensive, though. Just one fifteen-minute call cost around $6.50. We could purchase calling cards through the commissary. My mom often took her hard-earned money up to the jail so that I could make a call to my family during the week. Every dollar on those cards was precious, allowing me to have contact with my mom and with the world that had been ripped away from me.