Robert Wayne Murray's mind
plays tricks on him in the sterile solitude of Arizona's death
row.
He portrays himself as the victim of a state
killing machine, like a baby chick being raised for
slaughter.
He envisions, in morbid detail, the
executioner sticking a syringe in his vein.
Like a
typical inmate, he assures you he is completely innocent of
the double murder that put him here.
No surprise that a
39-year-old convict doesn't like his date with fate. But, in a
new book,
Life on Death Row, Murray does offer an
insider's view of his days there. Here is a typical passage:
It's a long time never to see a blade of grass or
feel sunshine on your face, or to actually see a tree, or hear
a bird, or feel the wind across your cheek. Think of a
thousand days without a face-to-face conversation, or ever
touching another person. Think of a thousand days, every day,
seven days a week, sitting in a concrete box with nothing to
stare at but a concrete wall 10 feet away. SMU 2 was
designed to break the spirit of the wild ones.
The book, released last
year, opens with Murray's declaration of innocence. He devotes
only a few vague paragraphs to the crime, and never identifies
the victims by name.
Regardless, news clips and court
records contain the homicidal facts: On May 14, 1991, Dean
Morrison, 65, and Jacki Applehans, 60, were gunned down during
a robbery in Grasshopper Junction, north of
Kingman.
The next morning, a Highway Patrol officer
tried to pull over brothers Robert and Roger Murray on
Interstate 40 near Holbrook. After a high-speed chase, the two
men surrendered.
The loot, the murder weapons and other
evidence were found in their car.
In the book, Murray
claims he and his brother were thieves, not killers. He says
they were driving home to Alabama after a Las Vegas vacation
when they happened upon an abandoned tow truck. They checked
inside the truck, discovered a bag full of money and guns, and
took it.
As for the slayings, he wrote, "We don't know
the people involved. We were not at the crime scene . . . We
were wrongly convicted."
Life on the inside
Murray stresses that
Life on Death Row is not about the crime, but the
punishment for 125 condemned criminals imprisoned in Florence,
Arizona. He wants readers to "look inside this conglomeration
that decrees itself a humane killing machine, that never makes
an error, and dispenses justice for the good of
society."
They live in cages of concrete and metal:
front wall of perforated steel, iron bunk, stainless-steel
toilet and sink, metallic mirror, steel table. Everything is
bolted or welded to the dull gray walls and floor. Inmates
cannot see one another but are always visible to corrections
officers.
Think of it in terms of an average
bathroom. Eighty square feet is not much. Hang out there for a
thousand days and it gets smaller. Somewhere there is a
library, hospital, cafeteria, laundry and other support
services. Death row inmates never visit such places . . . Many
spend years in here without ever going more than 50 feet from
their cells.
Finally, Murray describes the
monthlong ritual leading up to death: a choreographed dance
among guards, the condemned and other inmates. With two weeks
to go, a suicide watch commences.
One is no longer
trusted to shave himself. Instead, he's handcuffed behind the
back while officers do it with an electric shaver . . . The
only thing left in life is the humiliation, the destruction of
self-esteem and the utter helplessness for the events to
come.
At a time when a person most needs to have
supportive communication and privacy, the state puts him in
total isolation and watches him every second of the
day.
What comes through most clearly is the
deensitized life in the Special Management Unit in Florence,
and the way death becomes an obsession. No windows, no birds
chirping, no scent of flowers. No coffee or tobacco. Just day
after day exactly the same, what Murray calls "the bare, musty
smell of existence."
In a telephone interview, Murray
is asked why condemned killers shouldn't expect strict rules,
severe conditions, intense security. He says a
carrot-and-stick policy would be better, offering privileges
to those who behave and deprivation to those who don't.
Waiting for death
In the book, Murray recalls
a day in 1999 when he was taken from his cell and informed
that the state Supreme Court had issued an execution warrant,
to be carried out Nov. 3. He'd never faced a kill date.
Suddenly, it was 38 days away.
My mind raced through
the past, searching for something to hold onto. I tried to
keep my composure . . . In addition to all of the mockery they
were making of my feelings, they were carrying on easily with
light banter as cheerful as any I could recall. It was
morbid.
Murray's execution was stayed. The case
remains stagnant in federal court. He bides his time writing
about ennui so intense that "your mind catches an idea and you
keep coming back to it, like a tongue always returning to a
broken tooth."
And remembering . . . he is just a boy,
visiting Grandpa's Alabama farm where 10,000 newly hatched
chicks are being groomed for slaughter. Little Robert secretly
snatches two of the chicks, puts them in his coat pocket,
takes them back to Michigan and raises them as pets until they
run off.
"I'd like to hang onto the idea that they did,
indeed, escape somewhere into the suburbs," Murray notes. "And
perhaps even managed to fly the coop and get back to Alabama.
I hold on to that fantasy."
But he is also a realist in
the most secure prison he can imagine. And he sees death by
needle as no different from being tossed into a wood
chipper.
Both are relatively fast and seemingly
painless . . . Except, the wood chipper leaves behind a big
mess. Not unlike the mess left behind in the hearts of those
who loved and cared for the inmate.
Life on
Death Row does not mention the mess left for loved ones 13
years ago. It doesn't describe Morrison and Applehans side by
side on the floor of their home, shot a half-dozen times with
pistols, then finished off with shotgun blasts to their
heads.