ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 5, 1996 TAG: 9601050015
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NORFOLK
SOURCE: By FRANK GREEN RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
The last call came the evening of May 25, minutes before his life ended quietly and right on schedule. So, too, ended an affair that had blossomed in the darkest of warrens imaginable.
The romance of Caroline Schloss and death row inmate Willie Lloyd Turner was in large part the twisted creation of murder and the vagaries of American capital punishment. It lasted a year.
But in Turner's death, some of the most intriguing mysteries of 1995 were born - not the least of which was the unlikely relationship between these two enigmatic and apparently dissimilar people, each a bundle of contradictions.
And, of course, an hour or two after his execution, a loaded but unused handgun was discovered in a typewriter that had been within his reach.
She was a psychologist who worked in a place where perspectives and norms can get pathologically warped. But not hers, she said. ``Minds and motors are my two great interests. Willie was my third.''
As their phone conversation wound to a close May 25, he told her, ``Well, they're waiting to come get me.'' She hung up and walked out the back door to a deck overlooking a shed, an alley and the rear of an apartment building.
A hundred miles to the west, inside Greensville Correctional Center, Turner was being strapped to a gurney, IVs were stuck in his arms and lethal drugs readied for his bloodstream. ``When is it going to start?'' he asked.
``All of these changes were taking place as I was sitting out there ... feeling what it must have felt like for Willie to be dying.'' When it was over, she said, ``part of me died.''
Two-thirds of Turner's life was spent in prison, the last 15 years on death row. His father was a drunk; he grew up in an impoverished, broken family. He became a troublesome convict who killed another inmate in 1973; then, given a chance at parole, he graduated to capital murder.
Schloss, who has a master's degree in psychology, said she abhors murder above all else. Yet she carries a .45-caliber handgun, owns a shotgun and rifle, is an expert kick boxer and can swear like an inmate one moment and pray in Hebrew the next.
Her career at Greensville taught her some lessons. ``When you work in a population of killers and you learn and see how they think, you develop a strong sense of security,'' she said.
``You go into a restaurant, you sit with your back to the wall. You go into a place full of people, the first thing you do is scan the area for people who are possibly deviant, antisocial or sociopathic.''
They both grew up in rural Tidewater. Like him, she grew up poor and in a broken home poisoned by alcohol. They even met once, in 1978. ``It was like we were very much similar and very much different,'' she said.
Interviewed last week inside a second-floor office in the same rundown, campus-area Norfolk duplex where she spent the night Turner died, Schloss shed some light on herself, Turner and their attraction.
A story about Turner appeared in editions of The New Yorker. The magazine held the rights to his story, and she said she had not been free to speak until it was published.
Schloss met Turner again after she was hired to work at Greensville in June 1994. Turner was held there, far from death row at the Mecklenburg Correctional Center, because he had demonstrated a propensity for escape.
They discussed personal and later legal business, she said. Among other things, they learned they had met years earlier in a restaurant in Franklin and she had given him her telephone number, though he never called.
When he was executed, he was 49, and she was 34. She does not find the attraction hard to explain.
``When we met [briefly] in '78, we had an immediate attraction and it picked back up again,'' she said. ``As we worked together, toward Willie's death, we became much closer.''
She said she fell in love with him, but it was not ``an intimate, falling in love, sexual-type relationship that other people have.'' Among other things, ``Willie was married, and I have very strict feelings about adultery.
``I loved Willie and Willie loved me. ... Our loving relationship was [driven by] time. There wasn't a lot of it, and we grew very close, very quickly.''
Like many corrections officers, she said she cared less about the offenses that got inmates in prison than their conduct once incarcerated.
``I never looked at Willie as a murderer,'' she said.
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