THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 1, 1995 TAG: 9509290617
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL BURKE
LENGTH: Long : 159 lines
When the phone rang in Virginia's prison death house Wednesday night, it was the final irony for Dennis W. Stockton, whose life was ripe with ironies.
The call came as Stockton lay strapped crucifixion-style to a metal gurney, minutes before he was to be executed. The IV needle was being inserted in his arm.
All through the day, Stockton had seemed resigned to his fate. Sure enough, first the U.S. Supreme Court and then Gov. George F. Allen rejected his last-minute pleadings during the evening hours.
Then, at shortly after 9 p.m., the phone rang. It can never be known what went through Stockton's mind in that moment - had the governor decided to grant clemency? - but he must have felt a surge of hope.
Earlier in the day, during a visit in the death house, he told me, ``I don't think God's through with me yet.'' Then, peering over thick black horn-rimmed glasses, he smiled. That was at 3 p.m.
When the phone rang in the death house six hours later, a prison official in black answered. ``No, this is the death house,'' he said. It was a wrong number.
Minutes later, Stockton, at 55 one of America's oldest death-row inmates, was declared dead by lethal injection, the 27th man in modern times executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia.
I considered Dennis Stockton a friend. I had no reason to think such a relationship would develop on the day I met him in the summer of 1984. The man I saw through plexiglass at Mecklenburg Correctional Center was gaunt and unsmiling. He glared at me with haunted, hollow eyes. There were no horn-rimmed glasses then. He had been convicted of murdering an 18-year-old boy and chopping his hands off.
In the days after the great escape from death row a few weeks earlier, I had written letters to the remaining death-row inmates, wanting to find out how six condemned men could flee into the night from the state's most secure prison.
Stockton was one of several who wrote back, but he had something no one else did: He had kept a daily diary for nearly a year leading up to and including the escape. He wanted it published, and I wanted to publish it.
After it appeared on the pages of this newspaper in September 1984, two things happened:
The state had to move Stockton. He began getting threats because he had named names and, in doing so, violated the prisoner's most sacred creed.
And Stockton picked up the pace of his writing. He kept up the diary entries. He scribbled short stories and his autobiography, and began working on one novel, then another. He started a prison newsletter.
We stayed in touch. He asked for my advice and criticism. He wanted to be published.
Through his writings, he could escape the madness around him. And he could create happy endings.
He wanted to tell the stories of people living free and happy in places where there was blue sky overhead and green earth underfoot. He wanted to tell the stories of people living in the Great Smoky Mountains. In order to perfect his characters' dialect, he practiced speaking the dialogue aloud in his cell, then writing it down.
All around him at M-Building in Powhatan Correctional Center, a prison considered one of the most dehumanizing in the nation, Stockton heard the din of caged men bellowing sounds indecipherable to the sane. He smelled the stench of human waste flung from cell to cell.
In that setting, Stockton wrote these words, in a novel he entitled ``Joshua,'' a gentle, fanciful Horatio Alger tale of a young baseball phenom growing up in the Smokies:
We'd just stepped back out on the porch to sip our drinks when I saw Alvin and Alex turn the corner above the church on their bicycles. Alvin was in the lead when they rode up at the store. He said,
``Killed us two rattlers a minute ago. I got one and Alex the ud'n. One had seven buttons.''
``Did you cut them in two pieces, bury their heads together and say The Lord's Prayer backwards as you buried them?''
``Do how?'' asked Alex.
``I can see y'all don't know one thing about rattlesnake buryin'. What did you do with them?''
It was Alvin that answered. ``Why, we pitched them into the weeds there alongside the road. Mama told us to not be handlin' snakes, but them bein' in the road, I figured it was okay to throw them outa sight.''
``And what do you think is gonna happen when you ride back by there? Well, I'll just tell you. Them snakes'll be layin' for you. Any fool knows that. A snake, rattlers 'specially, has to be buried by the book, or else abody is in for trouble.''
As Stockton's execution date neared, he approached me with an idea. He wanted the newspaper to publish, in diary accounts, his own countdown to execution. The newspaper, after much discussion, agreed to publish the account, but under one condition: He would not be allowed to plead his case in print.
Stockton had special qualities that would enable him to pull off this unusual assignment. He had exceptional powers of observation and recall. He had an eye for detail. He was a good writer getting better. And he was able to report on his plight in a surprisingly dispassionate tone.
His first diary excerpt was published on Aug. 6, shortly after he received a Sept. 27 execution date. The last was published Thursday - the day after he died.
As the diary accounts appeared, some readers objected to the newspaper devoting space to a convicted murderer.
Stockton insisted during all the years I knew him that he was not responsible for the murder of Kenneth Arnder. I have spent many hours talking to people involved in the case. I have read the trial transcript and hundreds - maybe thousands - of pages of appellate briefs. I still do not know if Stockton was guilty of the crime that sent him to death row.
But I am sure of one thing: He did not get a fair shake from the judicial system. When he was executed, there were questions about the credibility of the key witness against him, the only person whose testimony elevated the charge against him to a capital offense. Those questions should have been answered by the courts before he was put to death.
Steve Rosenfield, one of two attorneys who took on Stockton's case and turned it into a cause, was eloquent in front of TV cameras Wednesday night. He noted one of the ironies of the Stockton case: The same judicial system that refused to grant Stockton a new hearing because the new evidence was produced too late in the game had refused to appoint investigators early on, investigators who may have - should have - found that evidence years ago.
``There's no doubt in my mind they got the wrong man,'' Rosenfield said into the microphones, his voice cracking with emotion.
Rosenfield and Stockton's other confidants were emotionally spent at the end. When minister and friend Ronald O. Smith shed a tear two hours before the execution, a stoical Stockton exhorted him to be strong. It was his nature, all the years I knew him, not to let anyone see what was happening inside.
In drafting a final statement Wednesday, Stockton was having trouble giving voice to his feelings. Smith suggested that Dennis let one of his fictional characters write the statement. Stockton's eyes lit up.
Stockton sat down and wrote a statement that began, ``From the diary of Danny Revels. . . . Somma y'all know me, but for those that don't, I'm really a figment of Dennis' imagination. . . . ''
It ended: ``To y'all that don't know the real Dennis, I wish you did.''
I got a glimpse of the real Dennis in the final hours of his final day. As our visit in the death house ended, he pressed his left hand to the glass that separated us. I pressed my right hand to his.
``Bill, I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity you gave me to become a published writer,'' he said. ``But most of all, I want to thank you for being my friend.'' MEMO: Bill Burke is editor of the newspaper's Criminal Justice Team. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Photos
Dennis Stockton, top, worked with Bill Burke, editor of the
Virginian-Pilot's Criminal Justice Team, bottom, in publishing
Stockton's diary.
FILE
Dennis Stockton, left, as he appeared in 1984 when Bill Burke first
met him. Stockton was one of several inmates who answered Burke's
letters about an escape from death row. Stockton had kept a diary,
and he wanted it to be published.
MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN/Staff
Below, Suzie Hudenberg, left, Chris Kulg and Thomas Cleary hold a
candlelight vigil outside the Greensville Correctional Center as
Stockton was put to death by lethal injection Wednesday night.
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KEYWORDS: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT VIRGINIA DEATH ROW MURDER
DIARY by CNB