The Governor, the Father, and the Murderer

THE GOVERNOR, THE FATHER, AND THE MURDERER

The state of Texas executes its condemned around six o’clock p.m. Minutes before six on February 22, 2018, Governor Greg Abbott commuted the death sentence of Thomas Bartlett Whitaker to life in prison without parole. Abbot was following the very rare unanimous recommendation of the Board of Pardons and Parole that Whitaker live out his life in prison.

For Texas this was astonishing. Nearly 150 people have been executed since a Texas governor last spared a condemned prisoner. Abbot has allowed thirty executions to take place during his three year tenure. Dubbed “the death penalty capital of the world,” since 1976 Texas has conducted 37% of the nation’s executions since 1936.

Extraordinary too is the way Thomas Whitaker’s clemency was won. This was not a case of wrongful conviction, nor of mental incompetence. What was decisive was the plea of a father whose son had tried to kill him.

The crime was monstrous and long premeditated. Offering cash, Whitaker enlisted friends as accomplices, and made plans three times in diabolical detail, only to abandon them twice. Finally, in 2003, when he was twenty-three, he told his family he was about to graduate from college. (Not true: he wasn’t even in school.) To celebrate, the family of four went out to dinner near their home in Sugar Land, a suburb of Houston. When they returned home, a gunman waiting in ambush shot to death Whitaker’s brother, his mother, almost killed his father, Kent, and — — to deflect suspicion — wounded Whitaker himself. The crime was not perfect; opened drawers intimated burglary, but nothing was disturbed.

Recovering in the hospital from a bullet wound near his heart, Kent Whitaker was consumed with hatred until he recalled the Bible verse, “’Vengeance is mine, I shall repay,’ saith the Lord.” The only way to get through the trauma was to forgive the killer, whoever it might be. “A warm glow flowed over me,” he said. “It took the fire out of me.” Unwittingly, he lived at home with the killer for the next seven months

Because there was no burglary, Thomas Whitaker fell under suspicion. When the police closed in on the getaway car driver, Thomas bought the identity of Rogelio (“Rudy”) Rios, a Mexican co-worker at a hotel, and fled across the border. In Cerralvo, a small town, he worked as a laborer and was warmly accepted into his boss’ family. After fifteen months he was arrested and jailed pending trial. Tried for capital murder, he was sentenced to death by lethal injection. The shooter, convicted of murder, was sentenced to life.​

Since the 1970s, a victims rights movement has sharply influenced the sentencing process. In capital cases, relatives of victims usually press for execution. But in his petition to the Board of Pardons and Parole, Kent put a twist on this pattern, insisting that he would be victimized again if the state put to death his last immediate family member.

Minutes before six Kent got word of the governor’s grant of clemency. “This is Texas,” he said. “This doesn’t happen.” His son said, “I’m thankful not for me but for my dad. Any punishment that I would have or will receive is just, but my dad did nothing wrong.”

The life-saving petition noted that Whitaker had encouraged other prisoners to further their education, and two guards called him a calming influence.

Whitaker had also become an accomplished writer and a compelling advocate for abolition of capital punishment. Minutes Before Six, the blog he founded for prison writers averages 40,000 hits a month and swayed hundreds to write on his behalf to the Board of Pardons and Parole. Two of his essays and a short story won first prizes in the PEN Prison Writing Contest. As a juror for the contest, I first encountered his striking talent in these works. In my experience, writing has helped many prisoners — not all — to recreate their lives.

Who is Thomas Whitaker, what drove him to plan the murder of his family, and has he really been rehabilitated?

The elder of two sons, he grew up in Sugar Land, an affluent, homogeneous community outside Houston. His brother won more of their parents’ attention, because of his learning disability. Whitaker was jealous and withdrew to the world of books. (When he was twelve, he was intensely affected by Albert Camus’ absurdist novel The Stranger. He identified with the unfeeling and isolated Meursault, Later he found the link uncanny; Meursault commits a gratuitous murder and faces execution.)

Heavy drug use may have fueled his crime, but Whitaker’s motive is elusive. He writes of his doomed effort to be “perfect” to win his parents love. Trying on masks, he became “a 13-year-old con artist.” In high school, he developed “at least 15 somewhat different versions” of himself,” but his emptiness only grew. “I tried to fill it with drugs and philosophy (sometimes both — Nietzsche on Crystal Meth could make anyone hate the world).” He finally realized that what he wanted “was revenge for being alive. As soon as the thought was born, it had a life of its own.”

Another take on his motive: the crime was a daring stunt. “We were all really, really miserable human beings and this was sort of our game of chicken we were playing with each other, how evil can we get.”

An upper-middle class white man killing his family: Whitaker’s crime made him a media sensation. Through thick glass he appeared on major TV, a good-looking man, so fair his cheeks are often rosy, with a soft, dispassionate delivery. (By contrast, in recent photos with friends and family, he appears warm and animated. His talk now, including impressions and accents, is said to be be very engaging.) For Oprah, he told Lisa Ling that he believed his family loved an impossibly idealized version of himself. “You start to bear a grudge against the people you think have set that high standard,” On “20/20,” he declared: “I wanted them dead.”

These flickering psychological hints evoke D. W. Winnicott’s notion of the true self and the false self. The authentic, spontaneous, or true self is what the infant experiences in simply being. A superficial, idealized, or false self is created when the need for compliance with the parents’ expectations encroaches on spontaneity. The false self can appear to be real, but it conceals a barren emptiness.

Believing himself “born with the wrong wiring,” Whitaker later considered the possibility that he was a sociopath. But, he told Kelly Kreth, “sociopathy can be beaten. You just have to work out a different way of arriving at the same destination other people get to naturally. A simple example: say you see some poor wretch on the sidewalk, and feel the need to help this person. But I can arrive at the same action (giving money or coat), by designing a set of ethical rules, in this case, that in order for me to maintain my superiority, I am required to help those less fortunate. Whereas your action would depend on empathy, mine would depend on an internal rule. But the result would be the same.” In lieu of treatment, the will is strengthened.

Though he late rejected the sociopath theory, Whitaker habitually designs “a set of ethical rules” for himself. And he has practiced Buddhism and sought Buddhist spiritual advisers. Unusually self-disciplined, he moves from goal to goal.

His progress toward mental and moral health was gradual. As a fugitive, haunted by guilt and fear, he admired the simple life of small-town Mexicans and began, as the amiable “Rudy Rios,” to live a decent life. Then, endangered, hiding out alone in the mountains of Mexico, he came to accept his inevitable punishment.

In 2007, Whitaker was convicted and sent to the Allan B. Polunsky Unit, where the condemned live in solitary confinement, in Livingston, Texas. Hoping it would be therapeutic, his father persuaded him to keep a journal, which Kent posted online. The rubric, Minutes Before Six, suggests that the texts, like last words, are deep and urgent.

In his first post Whitaker hopes that MB6 will “stand as evidence for something that we all know in our cores, beneath our politics and our prejudices: people change. They grow.” He promised “a rather interesting (I hope) map of what a person goes through during the years preceding an execution.” The man who had created multiple personae commits himself to transparency: “This is for you, Dad. The masks are off.” With characteristic irony he disavows his nickname, Bart. “Those of you who knew me as Bart, sorry. Bart is dead. Good riddance. I never much liked the son-of-a-bitch anyways.” He aims to shape a new life as Thomas.

Why should we believe a seasoned conman? A person who wore fifteen masks — can he unmask? If he used language to manipulate others, why should his words now persuade us? This reader approached his work with skepticism.

Moral evolution is a major theme in Whitaker’s writing. He monitors his change, repeatedly acknowledging his guilt. He wants to do penance. Sometimes he welcomes punishment. “I have converted the evil done to me in the name of Justice to another account. Every time that a guard pushes me into a wall, or I lose books or letters or photographs during a shakedown, or I have to stand naked in front of a whole group of guards, or a pen-pal disappears,” he writes, “or I feel like my world has contracted because a good friend was just murdered by the state, it all goes towards the balance. I have this thought — silly, perhaps — that one day, all of this will add up to the point that I no longer have to feel hatred when I look at myself in the mirror.”

Prison serves him, he implies. “I owe it to myself . . . [to] everyone I once knew and hurt, to feel every last ounce of this present pain , . .This is the only way I know to find redemption.”

On the fifth anniversary of the murders, he turns a corner. He embraces choice, which, “running on autopilot,” he had forgotten. “Five years. Five years it took me to choose right action . . . For the first time in my life, I believe in Thomas, and so these things I value — morality and kindness and self-control — these things are me. . . . I chose to fill my life and my veins with poison. . . I chose to surrender my free will to hate. No more. I choose honor. . . . I choose dignity. . . I choose to be better than I have ever been.”

The governor, the father, and the murderer: each behaved in an extraordinary way — the first propelled by public pressure, the second by religious imperative. The third would seek healing through will power and imagination.

Perhaps the will can educate the heart. Whitaker chose to know and care for other death row denizens. Behind each solitary confinement cell is a small exercise cage, opened ten hours a week, enabling communication. Through the wire mesh. Whitaker tutored one neighbor in geometry. He made friends. Braiding threads of bed-sheets into a “fishing line,” he snaked it under his door to retrieve messages thrown into the corridor. As a certified paralegal he worked on the cases of his fellow condemned. He created moving portraits on the occasion of their executions.

MB6 had a growth spurt after Dina Milito, a victim of assault seeking to understand violence, corresponded with Whitaker. He said that he had the same question. Their connection was so reparative to her that she became an opponent of capital punishment. In 2011 Milito agreed to manage the site and recruit other prison writers. Contributors now number 125.

Milito shared examples 0f Whitaker’s kindness, He gave birthday books to his fellow prisoners and wrote to her son when he had trouble in school. Knowing how much she would miss his letters after his death, he wrote her ten and arranged for them to be mailed over the next few years.

Asking men around him to contribute, Whitaker initiated an MB6 feature called “Letters to a Future Death Row Inmate.” One offers trenchant advice: “So use your head and don’t sleep walk because if you do they will take all you got. Take the time to see how much more life can be if you just be your own man and don’t listen to others that just want to see you pulled down to their level.”

Conventional wisdom has it that prison is a school for crime. But Whitaker notes “an almost desperate search for self-improvement and enlightenment. When you force a man to view his own mortality, and then give him ample time to ponder it, you would be amazed at the changes that are brought about.”

In his own pursuit of enlightenment, Whitaker chose to educate himself. He got no help from the warden (“Why the fuck would I waste my time educating a corpse?”) but found a way to earn both a B.A. and an M.A. He is a polymath. Given his profuse output for the log (157 entries, and counting) and his vast correspondence, his consumption of books is astounding.

His omnivorous reading often spills into his writing. Though his prose is never academic, it abounds with arcane vocabulary and literary quotations, often in Latin. His reading of Hume, Dostoyevsky, Spinoza, Russell, Schopenhauer, Camus, and Hitchens, he writes, helped him to concretize his thoutght. Eventually “the old feigned self-defensive is replaced by the real thing” and his prose displays ‘the inevitable audacity of the self-made intellectual.’ There are not a lot of pathways though this hell which end up in a better place than where you began. I like what I am becoming.”

Whitaker chooses to educate the public which has “zero sympathy” for death row prisoners because it know “nothing true” about them. Denied the outlet of work, they are prey to boredom. “Boredom is the spiritual and mental sedative that numbs you, breaks you down to the point that the actual 6:00 PM cocktail feels more like a relief than a punishment. Whatever death is, it is new, and something new after a lifetime in seg is always going to be, at the very least, interesting.”

Whitaker counters boredom with surprising ingenuity. Skillful with contraband, he has made in his cell speakers, a soldering iron, jewelry of plastic bags, and even yogurt.

Fighting capital punishment gives him direction. “After a life without a rudder, I finally have a cause worthy of my attention.” He challenges the belief that execution provides closure for the victim’s family, noting that death penalty cases drag on for years, subjecting that family to repeated pain.

Though he reads chiefly philosophy, history, sociology, law and religion, and writes mostly confession, information, advocacy, Whitaker praises literature for enlarging one’s empathy: “One learns to feel again by allowing others to get close enough to wound you. Literature is one way to manage this.” Empathy was a chief deficit in his old life as Bart. And so he turns to literature.

One of his stories, “Suicide By Papercuts,” represents a dialog with a therapist, both voices witty and philosophical. A guard’s voice interrupts, “Whitaker, you alright in there? . . . Sounded like you was talkin’ to yoself.” The piece creatively adapts his experience of self-division.

Begun in 2012, “No Mercy For Dogs;” a saying of narco-traffickers) is an ongoing autobiographical work (twenty-two installments in MB6 to date), about his fifteen month refuge in Mexico. This is his richest writing. Propelled by guilt and fear, the fugitive buys passage across the treacherous border and a narco-trafficker gives him precarious shelter. He memorizes terrain so he can find his way. He has to learn everything, from Mexican Aargot to how to snare a rabbit (though the murder of one so distresses him that he gives up the practice). His online readers are especially keen for more.

“A community of writers and artists,” MB6 incorporates its readers. Their comments — and often writers’ responses to them — are posted after each entry. While Whitaker has received abundant hate mail, many readers testify that he has made them rethink their attitudes.

Developing unforeseen inner resources, Whitaker made a rich life in a notoriously harsh prison. He has real friendships, the books he wants, the time to read them, and the means to write, publish, be read, and answer his readers.

The valuable life Whitaker forged in prison may be his best argument against the death penalty, but in this afterlife, he can offer others.

He has been transferred to Tennessee Colony Prison where he will be housed in general population. He looks forward to being able to work, to tutor others, participate in crafts, and continue writing.

In his first post-commutation dispatch, he reviews his mental health: “When I received word at 5:32 pm that I wasn’t about to be pumped full of fraudulently obtained and possibly expired barbiturates, I immediately snapped to the next set of goals. That’s how I’ve been living for so long, it was all I could think to do.” Though in the recent months, “I remained true to both my principles and ideals, as well as maintaining my calm,” and “worked hard to stay Zen, . . .I’m aware I did real psychic damage to myself over the past decade, learning to live comfortably so close to the void, without the protective shielding offered by irrational hopes or delusional theological beliefs.”

He assesses the damage: “Of all of the goals I set for myself during my time on death row, none were more central or important than that I live rationally, to the best of my abilities; that I not delude myself about what was happening to me . . . and that I learn to stare down my fate and the full extent of the State’s power that was arrayed against me and not blink. . . . So, I’m very aware that I’m not just numb right now. I’m something else. I stripped away my fear and watched calmly as other parts of my humanity were carried off with it. I wasn’t pleased to learn that when you lop off the troughs of the emotional sine wave, you forfeit the crests too, but what was I to do? I had my goals, and the State had its. It was war. Things die in war.”

His beliefs, long in flux, are clarified. “Nihilism isn’t inevitable once you acknowledge the disenchantment of the world. There are other options. But I seem to be wired for it, or to at least to flirt with nihilism’s borders, [beyond any utility it might have presented to me during my sojourn into the land of the near-dead.] Existentialism was the little castle I built on the banks of the nihil, and then I pretended to lose myself in projects. It was enough, then. I suspect it no longer is. Now that I am once again mortal in the same untruncated sense as most everyone reading this, I want more: more feeling, more joy, more love, things I deprived myself of out of necessity, or out of a sense of justice. . . . Just in case I managed to survive the Row, over the years I’ve searched for a sort of middle path between the Abrahamic God of my childhood and the quasi-nihilism of these later years, a position that didn’t require me to sacrifice reason or intellect while also not foreclosing on the ability to reach the beauty that is inherent in the world. . . . More than anywhere else, I locate this third way when I read and think about Spinoza. If I’m ever to believe in ‘god’ in any sense, it is almost certain that it would be his god, the god of the infinite intelligibility of the world.”

Survivor’s guilt assails him, but he converts it to use. He recalls a good friend still on Deathwatch, “I feel like I betrayed him by leaving him behind. . .. A hard truth, suspected and now confirmed: I will not have truly escaped my death sentence until this penalty is abolished and all my friends are out of that hellhole. . . . I don’t exactly know what life has in store for me going forward, but if anyone wondered if I was done penning polemics against the State just because it did the right thing once . . . think again.”

Elsewhere Whitaker wrote, “I’m not the smartest person around or the most knowledgeable, but I may be the most relentless.” Here he thanks his readers for riding it out with him. “ Let’s continue the fight. My particular battle for life is over, but the broader war for abolition continues. Onward.”

Bell Gale Chevigny