Before He Wakes (48 page)

When the light on the judge’s bench flashed before eleven, the court quickly and nervously reassembled, wondering if the jurors could have reached a decision so quickly. But the bailiff delivered a note to the judge instead. The jurors requested five Cokes, four Diet Cokes, two Dr. Peppers and a 7-Up. The judge ordered that the state buy them and deliver them to the jury room.

The jurors sent out a second note at 11:48, this time a question: “Does life imprisonment actually mean that you will be in prison until the day you die?”

It was now noon, and Judge Allen brought the jurors back and told them that the meaning of life imprisonment was not for them to consider and they should eliminate it from their minds. Then he sent the jurors to lunch in a group, accompanied by the bailiffs, telling them to be back by one-thirty.

When the jurors had returned to their deliberations, the courtroom settled again to waiting. Lawyers, law enforcement officers and others from the prosecution side were relaxed, chatting in groups, sometimes joking and laughing.

Barbara’s family and friends huddled together for support, tense and worried. Cotter sat alone much of the time in a dark mood. When a reporter, Libby Lewis, approached to ask where he might be later in case she needed a comment for her story, he looked up with a little smile.

“Drunk,” he said.

In the jury room, some jurors sat looking inward, saying nothing for long periods. Others cried and read the Bible. But each vote was changing now, one or two votes swinging after each period of deliberation.

After the judge brought the jurors out for a fifteen-minute recess at three, they returned for a new round of talking. Only two jurors remained to be swayed. This time when Watkins asked for a new vote, all twelve hands went up, some of them slowly.

The light on the judge’s bench flashed again at 3:55, and the court quickly reassembled.

“All right,” said the judge. “There’s a light on indicating that the jury wants to come out. I do not know if they have a verdict or not, but again I will remind everybody that if you cannot control your emotions, please leave the courtroom now.” He turned to the bailiff. “All right, Mr. Tolliver, go see if they’ve got a verdict.”

The jury did.

“All right,” said the judge, “tell them to put all of their twelve copies in one sheet. Tell the foreman to be sure it is signed and dated and put the original in the other envelope and hold that until they come in here.”

As the jurors filed back in, an anxious courtroom strained to read their faces.

“Mr. Foreman, have you reached a verdict?” the judge asked.

“Yes, sir, we have.”

“Would you hand first all of the twelve sheets to the bailiff and keep the verdict? Mr. Tolliver, give this to the clerk. I will ask the clerk to take the verdict.”

The verdict was passed to Cynthia Myers.

“Mr. Foreman,” she said, “will you please stand?”

Watkins stood.

“You have returned as your verdict on the issues, issue one, aggravating circumstances, yes.”

The jury had agreed that Barbara had killed Russ for money.

But as the clerk continued to read, it became clear that the jurors had agreed to all the mitigating factors as well.

Barbara’s life would rest on whether or not they had found the four mitigating circumstances—that she had reared two fine children, that she was an active and helpful church member, that she had been a friend to many people, and she had no significant criminal record—to outweigh the single aggravating factor.

“You have returned as your recommendation that the jury unanimously recommends that the defendant, Barbara T. Stager, be sentenced to death,” Myers read, her voice quavering.

A gasp swept through the side of the courtroom where Barbara’s family and supporters sat. Barbara collapsed in her chair, sobbing.

“Is this your verdict?” Cynthia Myers was asking.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Is this still your verdict?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you want the jury polled?” the judge asked a morose William Cotter.

“Yes, sir.”

As each juror stood, confirming the verdict, Barbara turned to her family with a look of agony and silently mouthed, “I love you.”

“Let the record show that the court accepts the recommendation of the jury and orders that it be recorded,” the judge intoned. “Everybody remain seated and no one leaves this courtroom until I tell you you can.”

He thanked the jurors and told them they were free to go. After the jurors had filed out, he turned to Barbara and her lawyers.

“All right, Mr. Cotter, do you and Mr. Falcone, or does the defendant wish to be heard?”

“No, sir,” said Cotter.

“You don’t?”

“No, sir.”

“Take this down. The prisoner, Barbara T. Stager, having been convicted of murder in the first degree by unanimous verdict of the jury duly returned at the term of the Superior Court of Lee County, North Carolina, and the jury having unanimously recommended the punishment of death, it is therefore ordered, adjudged and decreed that the same Barbara T. Stager be and she is hereby sentenced to death, and the sheriff of Lee County, in whose custody the said defendant now is, shall forthwith deliver the said prisoner to the warden of the state penitentiary at Raleigh, who the said warden on the twenty-eighth day of July 1989, shall cause the said prisoner, Barbara T. Stager, to be put to death as by law provided. May God have mercy on her soul.

“Mr. Sheriff, I will ask that everyone else remain seated and you may escort Mrs. Stager out of the courtroom.”

After Barbara was led away by bailiffs and court was adjourned, reporters crowded around her family.

“Just go away,” Bryan told them.

Across the aisle, the mothers of Russ Stager and Larry Ford met in silent embrace.

Before the trial, Doris Stager had promised God that if He would allow Barbara to be convicted, she would not ask Him for the death penalty, and she had kept her word. But she was grateful now that He had seen fit to grant that, too. “I’ve been in agony, deep depression and mourning, day and night, ever since my son’s death,” she told the reporters who clustered around the Stagers and Fords. “The only thing that has kept me going is that I know that my son Russell had Christ as his Lord and Savior, and therefore his spirit went immediately to heaven when he died…. Justice has been done.”

“It’ll never be over for us,” said Russ’s sister, Cindy, “because Russell’s dead.”

“Our lives have been shattered,” Henry Ford said. “It has taken eleven years … to give us the unanswered questions in our hearts.

“God is a God of miracles, and He certainly proved it in this case. Our prayer was that His will be done in every respect of this trial and give us faith to accept the truth. We feel He has done so, and we thank Him.”

When the reporters turned to Eric Evenson for his comments, he expressed sympathy for Barbara’s two sons. “They may not grasp what has happened here,” he said, “but they are the ones who have ultimately suffered with the Stagers and the Fords.”

37

Barbara refused meals at first after being taken to the North Carolina Correctional Institute for Women in Raleigh. She was too upset and depressed to eat, she said. But an outpouring of support from family, friends and church members caused her to rally and begin taking meals.

Family and friends clung to Barbara’s innocence, unable to accept that the dark specter that had been revealed in her trial could be real. Instead, they trusted the brighter face that she always had presented to them: dutiful daughter, loving sister, faithful wife, devoted mother, good friend, devout Christian, upstanding citizen.

Some friends wrote letters to newspapers decrying her conviction and sentence. Carol Galloway chastised the jury for failing to consider the evidence carefully. “As a result,” she wrote, “an innocent woman is facing death, two sons are without a mother, two fine people are without a daughter, two fine young men are without a sister, a lot of people are without a true friend, and the world is without a wonderful person. This is truly sad.”

Sherry Sims wrote of her pride in having a person so good as Barbara for a friend. “I wish everyone could know her as I do; then there wouldn’t be any doubt in anyone’s mind that Barbara could never hurt anyone willfully or intentionally. She is just not that type of person. I admire Barbara, too, for holding on to her faith in God through this terrible ordeal.”

The faith that Barbara’s friends had in her was understandable. If the secret side of Barbara shown at the trial was true, then they had been duped, and they did not want to acknowledge that. Some never even questioned whether Barbara could have committed the acts of which she was accused, saying that as Christians they were not to pry or judge, only to love her. For them, it simply was impossible to believe that a person of Barbara’s background could do such things, because to do so would threaten all that they held true and precious. She had been taught Christian values and morals and continued to voice them. She had been saved and baptized. If dark forces could overwhelm that and take control of her against her professed will, they could snatch anybody.

“To me, it is so devastating that I feel like that could be my daughter,” said a friend of Barbara’s mother.

For Barbara’s family and friends, accepting her innocence was far easier than facing the monstrous possibilities that her guilt implied. They had to believe that the Barbara they knew was the only Barbara.

“Barbara has been done a big injustice,” her mother told a reporter from Raleigh’s
News and Observer
in the only public statement she would make after the trial. “She has always been a good child, a good person. I can’t understand how the circumstances can be as they are.”

“It’s broken their hearts totally,” a close friend of Marva’s said of the family, “but it’s drawn them even closer together, because they’re working for the same thing, and that’s to save Barbara.”

Barbara’s family knew that she would not be executed in July as Judge Allen had ordered. All death sentences are automatically appealed in North Carolina, and ten years or more could pass before such a sentence would be carried out. Also, they knew that Barbara had an excellent chance of winning a new trial. Even Judge Allen acknowledged in a newspaper interview that the chances were good that his rulings could be overturned by higher courts.

The trial intrigued legal scholars because of the unusual combination of issues that it raised. The first, and most important, was that Larry’s death, for which no one ever was charged, had been allowed into evidence. Although the United States Supreme Court had made it easier in recent years for evidence of unproven crimes to be introduced, nobody was sure just how far that could be taken and whether it would stand in Barbara’s case.

Vital to this were the similarities in the two deaths, which Eric Evenson had gone to great lengths to show, and the evidence that Larry’s death had indeed been something other than accident or suicide, which the investigators had spent weeks trying to prove. But the conviction also could stand or fall on the reason the evidence had been allowed. In this case, it had been admitted to show that Russ’s death had not been an accident.

The second issue was the tape of Russ’s voice. Was it authentic? Was it relevant? Had it turned up too late? Should the jurors have been allowed to hear it?

Those two issues would be the heart of Barbara’s appeal, and the legal community would be watching closely as this case crept through the appeals process.

Because Barbara was indigent, that process was initiated by Gordon Widenhouse of the state appellate defender’s office in Raleigh. Young and energetic, with a reputation as a superb appeals lawyer, Widenhouse was looking forward to arguing Barbara’s case. But a month after Barbara’s conviction, Widenhouse was informed that it was being taken from him. Led by her brother Alton, who recently had filed for legal custody of Jason, Barbara’s family once again was coming to her defense. They had hired a prestigious, politically powerful and expensive law firm in Raleigh, that of brothers Wade and Roger Smith, to conduct Barbara’s appeal. Wade Smith had been one of the lawyers who represented Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald in his famous murder trial. Roger Smith would handle Barbara’s case. Her family was determined to save her, even if it cost them everything they had earned in a lifetime of hard work.

Only one other woman was on death row when Barbara went to prison. Before the North Carolina Supreme Court would hear her case nearly two years later, two others would join them. They lived in cells seven feet square, where they took all their meals. They were allowed out once a day to shower, once a day to walk in a small exercise yard. Once a week, on Saturday mornings, Barbara was allowed a two-hour visit with any three of fifteen people she put on her visitor list, most of whom were family members.

Barbara quickly became a model prisoner. She joined a Bible study group and attended religious services faithfully. She took up needlepoint, knitting and other crafts. She began showering friends and family with gifts of needlepoint Bible verses, afghans, stuffed toys. She read a lot, and spent many hours answering the great volumes of mail she received.

“Keep praying for me,” she kept writing to her devoted supporters.