Death in the Spring

"You hear the men cry out in their particular little madnesses.  You know what it is: the Angel of Death just jumped on somebody." Earl Clanton was talking about his nights on Mecklenburg's death row.  "You hear their agony--they start singing crazy songs, playing music loud, calling to a buddy--they need somebody to talk to, they need to get with something besides this insanity.  And the Angels of Death constantly try to seduce you, all the time."

Clanton himself has had an on again/off again relationship with the Angel. Condemned to death for a November, 1980 murder in Petersburg, Virginia, he was one week away from the electric chair in August of 1982 when he received a stay of execution from a state judge.  If he had died then he would have had the dubious distinction of being the first man executed by the state of Virginia in twenty years.

That wasn't the only dramatic reversal in Clanton's career.  Citing shoddy legal work, Judge Robert R. Merhige voided his death sentence in July of 1986.  According to Merhige, the attorney should have brought out Clanton's story of being an abused child at the trial.  Clanton spent a year in limbo in the general population at the State Penitentiary in Richmond.  Then Merhige was reversed by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.  Clanton's date was set: March 17, 1988.  But even that wasn't definite--in early February of this year, Clanton's date was changed again, this time to April 14.

Clanton made nationwide headlines in June, 1984 when he was part of the largest death row escape in U.S. history.  Six men broke out of the "escape proof" Mecklenburg Prison.  Clanton was one of the first to be recaptured.  James and Linwood Briley were the last.

Enter Jay North.  The former child actor, star of "Dennis the Menace," interviewed Clanton while researching the Mecklenburg escape for a possible movie.  He shelved the movie project when Clanton's death sentence was reinstated.  Now North is working with the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons, the group trying to have Clanton's sentence reduced to life in prison.  Though North has hardly marshalled the proverbial "ground swell of support," he has achieved some results:  Ed Asner has written a letter to Governor Baliles.  Other appeals are promised.

Clanton's support has a different tone from the protests surrounding most executions.  Much of it stems from the year he spent at the Penitentiary waiting to be resentenced.  While there he wrote an essay on child abuse that won a prize from Parents Anonymous of Virginia.  He starred in the video "A Time to Learn," a half hour production promoting literacy that was broadcast on Richmond station WWBT.  And he recorded a public service announcement against teen suicide, also broadcast locally.

"The constant thought of death is like your angel."  Clanton spoke in the visiting room of Mecklenburg Prison.  The furnishings were spare--a table, chairs, and a couple of vending machines.  Most of the wall was glass above waist level so the guards could observe.  Two watched throughout the interview.  "He or she professes to be a good angel—and tries to lure you into suicidal thoughts...`Why don't you just kill yourself and get it over with?  Take the pleasure away from them.’

"But then you learn that you don't have the right to do that.  I don't have a right to kill myself.  No one has a right to kill me.  I have no right to kill anyone else--killing, killing, killing--it's wrong, period.

"You have men that have killed themselves here—Little Johnny LeVasseur, they found him hung in the shower.  It was a suicide.  He listened to the Angel of Death.  I say don't do that.  I say get up and exercise..."

Clanton does 500 push-ups and 500 sit-ups every day.  On weekends he practices T'ai Chi.  In spite of all his exercise he's not  physically imposing.  He admits he can't gain weight because of worry, but it's more than that--he doesn't carry himself aggressively.  His demeanor is more of the intellectual than the athlete.

He was brought to the interview in shackles which were removed when he got inside the visiting room.  His prison blues were clean and there was the faint disinfectant smell of Corrections Department soap.  An eerie touch: Clanton's hair was cut in a "fade"--full on top and shaved on the sides.  The style suggests the skullcap of the electric chair.

Clanton has read Nietzsche, although he confesses, "I just couldn't get into his head, period." He has more of an affinity for Frost and Thoreau.  "Plato--I can get into him, namely his allegory of the cave."

He's pursuing a correspondence degree from Southside Virginia Community College.  He says he mostly wants the diploma as something to give to his mother.

Clanton is disinterested in most tokens of achievement.  Although he advanced enough in the martial arts to act as an instructor, he's never accepted a belt.  Nor did he accept trophies when he boxed as a light heavyweight in a New Jersey prison.

"I didn't want a trophy...I was doing what I loved doing.  I liked practicing my art--what I trained for, what I run everyday for, what I do all those sit-ups for, all those push-ups, all that heavy bag, all that medicine bag--what all of that was about.  The prize is not the thing that's important to me...it's the struggle--that's where the virtue is at.  Champions are replaced daily.  But what you get along the way is yours."

Clanton fights being categorized in other areas as well.  In religion he's "spiritual"--a designation he insists on over "Christian" or "Muslim." Perhaps he avoids boundaries in his internal life because the borders of his external one are so clearly defined--the eight by ten cell; the strict routine; the guard towers, razor wire and walls.

In a like manner, he avoids specifics when he talks.  The thrust of his discourse is all philosophical:  principles and issues, feelings and ideas.  Abstractions.  The Big Overview.  He'll give you dates and places, but you have to ask for them and that interrupts the flow.  His emphasis is understandable.  Facts are the tools of the newspapers and the courts.  And the word "date" has a very specific meaning for Earl Clanton, one that he can't avoid.  April 14 is there behind every thought, and it's coming a little bit closer every second.

"When I lay my head on my pillow, it's like meditating--you go into the Cave of Meditation and you meet all the demons.  But you gotta know the geography--you gotta know what's real in your head and what's not real."

Clanton, of course, is talking of metaphorical demons, just as before he spoke of metaphorical angels.  But that doesn't make what they represent any less frightening.

The geography of his mind must be full of such dangerous places, areas where a medieval cartographer would have drawn a demon, perhaps, or written the warning "Here There Be Dragons."  And the most frightening place on that map has to be the red area at its center, the event that's dictated every moment of Clanton's life since it happened: the strangling and stabbing death of Wilhelmina Smith, a 38-year-old elementary school librarian, on November 16, 1980.  It was his second conviction for murder.

Earl Clanton, Jr. was born June 1, 1955.  Thirty years later that would be the day he escaped from Mecklenburg Prison.  His parents separated when he was a baby and he became a "shipped around" child, living with his maternal grandmother, Mrs. Lory Perry, then moving to his father's home in Highland Springs.  He attended Fair Oaks Elementary School.  In the essay he wrote for Parents Anonymous he stated: "Up until my father's alcoholism grew to addictive, irrational and uncontrollable physiological and emotional levels, life as a child knows it, was beautiful.  It was just a matter of getting  house work and home work completed to my parent's satisfaction."

Clanton's father's brand of choice was Old Crow.  When he drank enough of it he'd start beating on the kids.  Earl lived with his sister:  "She and I would go to our room, confused about the duties and expectations we had not met...When we could think of none, we'd hug each other, as if shielding each other from those lethal blows from brooms, belts, hangers and cords and, in my case, fists and feet.  (I was a scrapper.)

"I used to feel so anguished when I watched my father unable to take off his own clothes or even get his penis out in time to urinate against the side of the house.  I was even more confused when, the day following his pummelings, he had the nerve to feel sorry for my condition."

Clanton helped his sister escape from the house.  He left shortly afterwards, going to live with his real mother in New Jersey.  He was 14 years old.

Toward the end of his essay, in parenthesis, Clanton asserts that he was sexually abused by his step-mother.  Says Johanna Schuchert, executive director of Parents Anonymous of Virginia, an organization dealing with the treatment and prevention of child abuse, "Violent crimes toward women and children by male offenders can often be traced back to sexual victimization.  Although this has not been conclusively proved, as it has in the case of sexual crimes, there is strong supporting evidence for the connection."  She cited studies of male sex offenders in Connecticut by Dr.  Nicholas Groth.

Clanton's contentions of child abuse are important in the light of Judge Merhige's ruling.  Merhige said that if Clanton's history had been brought out at the trial, "at least one juror and perhaps all, as well as the trial judge, would have concluded that...the death penalty was not warranted."  The ruling states elsewhere, in reference to Clanton's lawyer, "...counsel's failure to make the slightest effort to obtain mitigating evidence was, though unintended, tantamount to complete dereliction of his professional obligation."

Clanton's lawyer was Timothy J. Hauler, now a general district court judge for Chesterfield County and the city of Colonial Heights.  "We find no deficiency in the lawyer's performance," wrote Appeals Court Senior Judge Clement F. Haynsworth Jr. of South Carolina in reversing Merhige.  The Richmond Times-Dispatch said the new ruling, "suggested he (Clanton) made up a story about an abused childhood to cheat the executioner."

"In an ironic twist,"  the T-D continued, " Clanton recently wrote a prize-winning story about the childhood beatings and abuse that led to his career of violence.  State prison officials use the essay to teach workers about the effect of such treatment in the lives of youth and adult offenders."

It's probably a useful teaching tool: about 80 percent of adult inmates were the victims of some form of child abuse.

In New Jersey, Clanton became addicted to heroin.  His mother had him arrested for theft and he served a year in jail for larceny.  About one year later he was charged with murder.  According to Clanton, his role was that of a lookout and he was coerced into pleading guilty.  From April 12, 1973 to November 13, 1979 his official residence was the New Jersey State Penitentiary.

Clanton remembers going cold turkey in a New Jersey holding cell:  "The individuals around me who were supposed to be my friends--they were concerned with my London Fog overcoat and my reptilian shoes and the diamond ring on my finger and my Longines watch.  In other words they had already buried me, you know?

"I think it was that moment that gave me a very different outlook.  I'm very careful who I call my friends. 

“I just crawled up under a bench trying to find some comfort and some quiet and basically laid in my own vomit for days.  I haven't shot drugs since."

Clanton says that he's been a vegetarian for twelve years.  He doesn't smoke cigarettes.  And he may be the only man incarcerated by the Virginia Department of Corrections who doesn't curse.  During three hours of interviewing he he'd didn't even say "damn."

Clanton started studying the martial arts in New Jersey.  That's also where he started boxing.  After his parole he moved to Petersburg where he lived with his mother and brothers until he got an apartment of his own.  In February of 1980 he was arrested for hitting a seventeen-year-old named Bruce Brown with brass knuckles.  On April 28, 1980, while on trial for malicious wounding, Clanton became a fugitive.  In a move which foreshadowed his exit from the "escape proof" Mecklenburg Prison, he simply walked away from the courtroom during a luncheon recess.

Clanton moved in with a 21-year-old women named Natalie Lawrence who lived in the Crater Square Apartments on South Crater Road in Petersburg.  Across the stairway landing was the apartment of Wilhelmina Smith. 

Wilhelmina Smith was 38 years old and had been working for the Petersburg School system for 15 years.  She had a masters degree from Virginia State University.  At the time of her death, she was a librarian at A.P.  Hill Elementary School.  Her funeral was held in Petersburg.  After the services her body was shipped back to Turkey, North Carolina, where her mother and relatives lived.

Shortly after noon on November 16, 1980, Smith returned home from a shopping trip.  Neighbors saw her drive into the parking lot.  When she got to the landing outside her door, these same neighbors heard her say words to the effect of, "What have I done to you?  Why me?"

The door slammed.  There were screams.  The neighbors called the police.  When the officers knocked on Smith's door a woman answered, saying to wait because she was in the shower.  The police insisted.  The door was opened by Natalie Lawrence. 

There was blood in the living room.  Wilhelmina Smith was on the floor of her bedroom.  There was a belt around her neck and she had been stabbed in the face and neck.  Clanton was found hiding beneath the bed in a second bedroom.  There was blood on his clothes and $8 worth of bloody bills in his pocket.

Clanton insisted on his innocence and took the witness stand in his own behalf.  "It was a bizarre story,"  said Judge Haynsworth in his reversal of Merhige.  It fit the facts.  Judge Haynsworth:  "According to Clanton, he and Ms. Lawrence were in her apartment when they heard Ms.  Smith screaming.  Ms. Lawrence urged him to lend a hand to Ms. Smith, and he undertook to do so.  In the living room of the Smith apartment he was attacked by an intruder.  They fought until the intruder fled through the apartment door.  He then entered Ms. Smith's bedroom where he saw Ms.  Smith lying on the floor stabbed and garrroted.  He got blood on his hands and clothing during his attempt to assist her, but he was then attacked by a second intruder.  He fought with the second man.  His bloody handprint was left on a wall when he "pushed off"  to deliver a karate kick.  The second intruder fled.

"Clanton testified that he wished to notify a relative of Ms. Smith.  He thought her checkbook might be an address book and picked it up to examine it.  That was the explanation of the bloody fingerprint on the checkbook.

"When the police arrived and demanded admittance, Clanton hid beneath the bed in the other bedroom because he was a fugitive and wished to avoid being discovered by the police."

Clanton's only child, a daughter, Shirdell Patrice, was born to Patricia Gill on the day Wilhelmina Smith was murdered.  Perhaps her birth triggered memories of his own childhood and he struck back at the closest parent available--himself.

On March 13, 1981, he was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair. More people have been executed in Virginia than in any other state.  According to Alabama historian M. Watt Espy Jr., about 1300 have been killed here since Colonial times.  New York is second, with around 1200.

The state gave up hanging in 1908 when an electric chair was installed at the State Penitentiary.  The same chair is still in use today.  242 men have died in it.  Earl Clanton is scheduled to become the 243rd.

Opponents of capital punishment are fond of quoting studies which show the murder rate actually rising after an execution.  The public doesn't care:  a 1986 Gallup poll showed that of the 70 percent of the population who favored the death penalty, 73 percent say they would still favor it if it were not a deterrent.

There is a surreal lightheartedness to "the largest death row escape in U.S.  history."  Basically the six men walked out of Mecklenburg.  It happened on June 1, 1984.  Clanton hid in a restroom, then overpowered a guard and opened some doors.  The escapees-to-be put on guard uniforms, then put something on a wheeled stretcher--the newspapers couldn't decide whether it was a television set or a fire extinguisher--claimed it was a bomb and rolled it out to a waiting van.  There followed a giddy period when every white male resident of the rural Mid-Atlantic states got his picture on television holding a gun.

Earl Clanton and Derick Peterson were recaptured while snacking on wine and cheese in a Warrenton, North Carolina coin laundry.  They had been out about 19 hours.  Lem Tuggle was captured next.  He was arrested by Ron Wonderlick, the Stamford, Vermont constable "whose normal workload rarely included anything more serious than locating stolen bicycles."  Later that same day--June 8--Willie LeRoy Jones gave himself up after breaking in to a vacant house near Newport, Vermont.  He had telephoned his mother in Richmond and she convinced him to turn himself in.

James and Linwood Briley were the last to be recaptured.  They were working as mechanics for an uncle in Philadelphia.  "Slim" and "Lucky" were their undercover names.  On June 19 they were apprehended eating barbecued chicken at a family picnic.

Jay North says Earl Clanton was responsible for making the escape non-violent.  Though they certainly feared  for their lives, none of the 14 hostages were harmed.  In published accounts, however,  two other death row inmates--Wilbert Lee Evans and Willie Lloyd Turner--were credited as being the ones responsible for the hostages' safety.

It is close to 2 p.m.  The guards remain watchful.  Clanton has maintained eye contact with me for nearly two hours, making me feel as if I were the one under scrutiny.  His speech slows as he relives his only night of freedom in the last seven years, a night spent in the woods outside Warrenton, N.C.

"How in the world we, in that pitch darkness, could have found our way to where we did...and to have the light come...and look around you and realize you really had everything you needed if you wanted to stay out there with those bugs and ticks biting you up in those mountains.  You had everything you needed--a pure lake of water.  It was perfect.  You know, guards walking up to you--no further than from me to you and then all of a sudden just stopping...with dogs--just stopping...then turning around and going away...It makes you wonder how all of that happened:  if they couldn't see you?... why couldn't the dogs smell you?...they just stopped, turned around and went back...It was eerie...I was scared to death...

"I think over all you could say it was spiritual, very spiritual.  We carved our name in a great big white oak tree...oak symbolizes strength and life...lastingness...It was unforgettable."

Clanton said that some of the guards thanked him when he got back after being recaptured.  "Some of them thanked me, some of them sneered and some of them still sneer.  But I'm not drawn off my square by that kind of stuff.  That's their problem.  It is not mine.  I can  leave yesterday to yesterday--and move on with today.  That's the only way you can make it on death row.  You can't reach for things that are not there."

Clanton spent about a year at the State Penitentiary in Richmond between the Merhige ruling and the reinstatement of his death sentence.  While there, he acted in the video "A Time to Learn," which was broadcast on local television.  The video, which promoted literacy, was a project of the Cineastes ("film enthusiasts"), a class inside the Penitentiary that Times-Dispatch film critic Carole Kass has sponsored since 1976.

"He was a tremendous help in making the video," says Kass.  "He was a very positive force, both with ideas and with carrying things through.  He took an unsympathetic role--he was the pool hustler who got the rebellious kid who couldn't read and had dropped out of school caught up in the drug trade.  It was a flashy scene--we had these lights playing in the pool room and there was Goldie (Clanton's nickname) in my son's sportcoat and my black fedora—he didn't have any words.  It all had to be done with pantomime.

He has a wonderfully expressive face...

"My feelings about Goldie are that this man has a great deal to offer...I don't think that killing him is going to either bring back that poor woman who died or make this a better world."

On August 20, 1987, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Merhige and reinstated Clanton's death sentence.  Clanton was moved back to Mecklenburg.  Shortly after his return an officer came up to him while he was on the prison yard doing sit-ups.

"He said, `The Virginia prison system is really messed up, Earl.  But I gotta tell you...they really got that execution thing down pat.  They got that right.

"I'm sitting there and I'm looking at him,"  Clanton told me, "and I'm trying to contemplate in my head where is he coming from?  What is on his mind?  Is this antagonism?  Is it just pure ignorance?  Is it racism?  What is it?  This was a white officer...

"He said, `It's like getting hit by an eighteen wheeler...at full speed...and you don't see it coming.  You won't feel a thing.'

"I said, `Just let me ask you one question before I tell you how deeply I'd appreciate your vanishing act:  how do you know these things?'

Clanton imitated a blustery white accent: "`Well...I...it's...you know...I've been around electricity a lot.'"

"It was an awesome thing for me,"  Clanton continued.  "It was my first confrontation with it when I got back...I'm not going to condemn or blame this individual for his level of ignorance.  I've just got to acknowledge it...and just keep on living."

Clanton's speaks with a rich, expressive baritone.  His voice was resolute when he discussed the particulars of his case, persuasive and reasonable when he spoke about political issues and religion.  There was a sadness behind it most of the time.  He brightened up when he talked about his wife, Janet.  They met in 1982.  "I was in Mecklenburg...She wrote me a letter...being a friend."  They were married on January 20, 1984.  No contact visits are allowed for death row prisoners.

"You have your moments of total disappointment, total powerlessness--and then you have those times when you have to smile--or go insane.  It's kind of hard to conceive of yourself being literally mutilated with electricity.  I don't have any problems per se with dying--but I have problems with being murdered.  In effect that's what it is.  They use a lot of euphemisms but it's murder--the old adage `a rose is a rose is a rose...'"

"...You're locked in, and you're powerless...When it gets very real, when it's right there in front of you it's like `Peace at Last.'  Because I've been there and, to me, the God presence is definitely in the death house.  It's certainly not you walking...something is taking you in there, but it's not really you...you're not even coherent.  You think you are but you're not.  You're just trying to get yourself through this, get yourself through this--you want to know why, why--why is this being done to me?  You really know all the answers, but you're saying `Why?'"

I interviewed Clanton twice for the purposes of this article.  The first time was at Mecklenburg on February 4.  The second time was on February 24.  Clanton had been moved to the Powhatan Correctional Center about a half hour west of Richmond.

At Powhatan Sgt.  B.B. Hollifield, a man of awesome spit and polish, accompanied me into the visiting room.  He unlocked a steel door.  It opened on a steel grate that was made more serious by bars.  Clanton was in a small room on the other side.  Sergeant Hollifield sat at the table with me and watched the interview.

Clanton and I tidied up loose ends and filled in blanks.  It was strange making eye contact through the diamonds of the steel grate.  Toward the end of the interview I mentioned that he had gotten me into doing push-ups.  I was up to 60--that's in sets of ten--Clanton does his 500 in sets of 100.

"Keep doing them!" he said, delighted to be able to encourage somebody at something. 

"Would it inspire you more if I told you I can do seventy five of them like this?" He extended the thumb and index finger of each hand.

"I don't know,"  I said.  "That might intimidate me."

"Don't be intimidated,"  he said.  "Be inspired!  You can do it!  You can do it!  You can do it!  If you can dream it you can do it."

I asked a few more questions.  Sergeant Hollifield said it was time to go.  We said goodbye.

"Keep pushing!" Clanton said, making enthusiastic push-up motions with his arms.  It was the last thing I saw him doing before Sergeant Hollifield closed the door.