God'll Cut You Down (22 page)

“And I said to him, ‘So what you’re trying to tell me is, you’re trying to say that you and Mr. Barrett engaged in homosexual activities?’ He said, ‘Yes. Several times.’ You know, previous dates. And I’m just getting the details, and I said, ‘Well, what do you mean? Explain.’ And he said that Mr. Barrett normally would pay him around two hundred dollars for Vincent to have sex with him. And I said, ‘What do you mean? Oral sex? What are you talking about?’ He described that Mr. Barrett liked to be taken from behind. Sodomized, basically. And Vincent would say, ‘I would sodomize him and that’s what Mr. Barrett liked.’

“And I said, ‘You expect me to believe this?’ And Vincent said, ‘I’m telling you, I’m just telling you the truth.’ He said, ‘I wouldn’t just sit here and make this up. I’m confessing to murder and I’m not just going to add this.’

“And I said, ‘Well, did Mr. Barrett ever sodomize you?’ He said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Mr. Barrett always wanted me to sodomize him.’ So he said he would sodomize Mr. Barrett for money. And that’s what happened.”

I’ve stopped taking notes. I quadruple-, quintuple-check the Dictaphone is recording. Tim and Wayne have just described the money shot of my whole “race” career: a white supremacist paying to be sodomized by a black man.

We all pause and swig down water from our polystyrene cups. Tim, Wayne, and I are so white that in our hands and running up our arms you can see the blue veins glow.

“Now, I don’t know why anybody in their right mind would confess to murder and admit they’re having homosexual relations with somebody when they’re not a homosexual, do you understand?” Tim continues. “You know, I love women. I’m married.” His gold wedding band attests to this. It glistens in a boardroom that is otherwise plain white (polystyrene cups), off-white (walls), or cream (manila folders). “I’m sure not going to make up a story that I’m having sex with a man. That would demean me—ruin my reputation, as it would any man’s.”

I can see that Vincent might have had trouble saying this in court. I can see that he would have had trouble with fellow inmates knowing this. That potential trouble could well have led him to disagree with the legal advice to use the sex element in this crime as his defense.

A career of wanting this to be true makes me get greedy again, and I ask if Richard wore the Nazi uniform while being sodomized by a black man.

Wayne tells me Vincent never said anything about a Nazi uniform.

“I can’t explain, you know, the psychological, in Mr. Barrett’s head,” Tim says. “I can’t explain what was going on. Why he openly hated black
people or Jew people, but then he was having homosexual relationships with black people. I don’t know.

“Now, speculation, okay? You know Vincent went to extremes to burn that computer, and we tried to retrieve that data. It was beyond obtainable. We don’t know what was on that computer because it was burned up. We don’t know if there were pictures, images. We don’t know, but we know that Vincent went to extreme effort to destroy that computer. More than anything else.”

“Poured more gas on it,” adds Wayne.

“And the bed also,” Tim says. “That was the only bed that was destroyed. The other beds were neatly made up in the house. But he made it a point to burn Mr. Barrett’s bed. He went to extremes. Why? I mean, if you want me to play psychologist, I could only guess—maybe that’s where they would have their relationships. I do not know that. I don’t know that firsthand. It could be that there may have been a better reason why he went to extremes to destroy the computer and the bed. I do not know.”

“We had trouble figuring out why the rifles were on his chest,” Wayne volleys in.

Rifles?

When the firemen splashed through the blood pooled up in the kitchen and dragged Richard out, three guns rolled off his chest: a semiautomatic rifle, a semiautomatic shotgun, and a lever-action rifle. They were Richard’s. Vincent had scooped them up from somewhere in the house and rested them on Richard’s chest. He hoped the heat from the fire would set off the guns and somehow that would make the whole scene look like a suicide.

“He wasn’t thinking rationally,” Tim says.

“He asked me, ‘Did the rifles go off?’” Wayne says. “I said, ‘No, the rifles didn’t go off.’ I said, ‘If you wanted to make it look like a suicide, then you use one rifle, not three.’”

“Yeah. So he wasn’t thinking right,” Tim says.

However, Tim thinks Vincent was thinking right in the interview room on the other side of the wall. He didn’t appear drunk or drugged or anything like that.

“He was very coherent,” Tim says. “He’s a very flashy guy. I said, ‘Do you realize that the man you murdered was a very well-known self-proclaimed racist against black people?’ He looked at me like,
What?
And when we told him that he’d killed pretty much a famous person, that really kind of made him excited.”

“What he thought,” says Wayne, “was that he was going to be famous in prison because this happened, and then when he went back to prison he’d be a celebrity. And he told us that he’d go ahead and plead guilty to it that day if we’d buy him a pimp suit with a hat with a feather in it.”

“It sounds like he had a sense of humor,” I say.

“Oh, he was funny. He was funny,” says Wayne. “I could say that it was a conversation like me and you are having a conversation and we’re making jokes about this. But he’s talking about a guy that he’s just killed—and he killed him with a passion, because I sat through the autopsy, and there were holes in Mr. Barrett’s shoulders that were about eight or nine inches long and deep, and it was about an eight-inch knife. So that means he plunged it all the way to the handle, several times, in the top of his shoulder.”

Vincent skipped over the welcome mat, into the black woods, two knives in his waistband, one knife in his hand. The one in his hand, Vincent later claimed, was the knife Richard came at him with. Vincent slung it deep into the darkness as he pelted to his mum’s back door.

Vincent burst into the living room, sweating, breathing hard, holding his stomach. His stepfather, Alfred, eyed the two butcher knives. One seemed clean, at least to Alfred’s eyes, the only light in the living room a glowing TV. The other knife was smeared with blood from tip to handle.

Alfred’s black Ford pickup sped toward a town called Piney Woods. He curved into Highway 49, the road gently rising to become a bridge. Vincent rolled down the window as if about to light a cigarette. But he didn’t light a cigarette. He flung the two knives out the window. The knives nose-dived over the side of the bridge and landed in thigh-high grass lining a creek.

Wayne remembers a later interview with Vincent in the white cube on the other side of the wall.

“Vincent said, ‘Well, I’m going to change my mind here. I’m going to say I didn’t do it.’ And I said, ‘Well, you already confessed to it one hundred times.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but you don’t have the murder weapons.’ He said, ‘You don’t know what happened.’ I said, ‘Yeah. Yeah, we do.’ I said, ‘We don’t need the murder weapon.’ He said, ‘Yeah, you do. I watch TV. I know you need the murder weapon.’ I said, ‘All right, Vincent. I’m going to tell you the truth. We have the murder weapon.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t.’ I said, ‘Yeah, we do.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t.’ I said, ‘We found them beside the creek.’ He said, ‘That creek just up from Florence?’ I said, ‘Yeah. That creek just up from Florence.’ He said, ‘What did it look like?’ I said, ‘Well, it looked like a knife. It got a silver blade and a black handle.’ He said, ‘Way to go, man!’”

I ask Wayne and Tim if they were familiar with Vincent before the killing. They’d never heard of him. But when the other investigator, Trip Bayles, drove into the McGee driveway, he thought,
I’ve been down here before.

“Vincent had a girlfriend,” Wayne says. “An Oriental girlfriend that he had assaulted with a knife.”

Trip told them Vincent had beaten her like a dog.

“And Trip couldn’t remember her name because a couple of years had passed, but he said, ‘I do remember that he had assaulted her and tried to cut her with a knife or something, and I believe I wound up putting him in jail or something, on a misdemeanor battery charge, or something like that.’”

“Could that have been when Vincent was underage?” I ask, trying to make it sound like a throwaway question.

“He was underage,” Tim says. “He was, like, seventeen at the time or something, and he would’ve taken him to what we call a juvenile detention center.”

I shouldn’t know this. This is what the lawyer Vicky Williams had refused to tell me—the reason Vincent was in juvenile detention when he assaulted the police officers.

Having pickpocketed this secret, I quickly change the topic. I ask about race.

Tim and Wayne tell me this case has nothing to do with race.

“You’ve got to realize,” Tim says of Vincent, “that this is a twenty-year-old young man who’s been in prison most of his teenage life.”

“Richard Barrett had kind of faded out of the picture over the years,” says Wayne.

“He didn’t know who Richard Barrett was,” Tim says. “And that was another thing. When we got to talking to the neighbors, all of the neighbors, the black neighbors, you know, they had heard of Richard Barrett, but they said—one man in particular told me, an older black man, a senior citizen—he said, ‘There’s no way in this world you can convince me that that man was a racist.’ He said, ‘He was the nicest man in this
neighborhood.’ He said, ‘If you needed to go down to the barn for some tools,’ he said, ‘Richard Barrett was there to help. He would loan you his tools. He was there to help.’ He said, ‘He visited with people, you know, he rode a bicycle there for exercise, Richard Barrett, and he would ride his bicycle up and down the road.’ He would stop and visit everybody. Not a single neighbor in that neighborhood who was black said anything negative about him. One man pulled up—an older man, I don’t know who he was, a black man who lived in the neighborhood—and when we told him, he said, ‘Is Mr. Barrett okay?’ I said, ‘Well, no sir. He’s passed away.’ He said, ‘What happened?’ I said, ‘Well, right now, we’re not at liberty . . . but he passed away.’ That man started crying because he loved him.”

Tim drains the last of his water from his polystyrene cup.

“I can’t explain it,” Tim says. “And then there he is, hating black people, but yet he’s wanting black men to sodomize him. Figure that—I don’t know. I have no idea. Was he . . . I mean, was there something wrong with Mr. Barrett? Was he suffering from something? I mean, was he suffering from some kind of dysfunction? I don’t know, I mean, I can’t tell you. I don’t know.”

“I think he was a Vietnam veteran,” Wayne says. “And there was a lot of people who returned from Vietnam that saw battle. And I think he saw battle in Vietnam.”

“He may have,” Tim says. “Now, did he suffer from post-traumatic stress? I don’t know. I’m not saying . . . by no means are we saying that all Vietnam veterans act like this. No. By no means. But we don’t know. We can’t explain what was going on in his brain.”

“In his old newsletter,” I tell them, “he’d say Vietnam changed him because the black soldiers weren’t as efficient. And didn’t back him up as much as the white men would.”

“I don’t know what you found out,” says Tim. “And you’ve probably got a lot more to go, but you’ll probably find out that Richard Barrett was a very, obviously, mysterious person. Very mysterious.”

I tell Wayne and Tim the Ballad of James Drew. That he was in a holding cell in Rankin County Jail six years ago, with cotton taped on his head to stop the bleeding. And he looked across the cell and there was Mr. Barrett.

That wakes up the room. Tim’s bright eyes dart to Wayne’s bright eyes.

I tell them Rankin County Justice Court has a record of James’s arrest, but not Richard’s.

“There you go,” says Tim. “But I will tell you this—and I don’t know where you need to look—I was told—and I don’t know what year this was—but somewhere in Hinds County, whether it was the City of Jackson or one of the local jurisdictions, but some man had filed an affidavit against Richard Barrett. And had him arrested for sexually assaulting him at that time.”

Is this corroboration of James’s story? James said a boy complained. In Tim’s story it’s a man. Also, James was certain he was in Rankin County, not Hinds County. Maybe it’s another sexual assault or the same one, with the details morphed through the grapevine.

I fold the news about the affidavit away for later and try a shortcut.

“If Richard
was
in a Rankin County holding cell and got out within hours,” I ask, “would there be records at all?”

“Let me look to see if he’s ever been here.” Tim levers himself up with his hairy hands and leaves the boardroom.

There’s a venetian blind behind Wayne not quite fully shut. I can make out smudges of the outside world, but nothing more. Now and then lollipop colors from prisoner jumpsuits roll by.

“I couldn’t find anything on Richard Barrett being in our jail,” Tim says. “If I was you, I would research Hinds County court records real well, because somebody filed an affidavit against him, somewhere.”

My two front teeth pull off my pen lid. I ask for the names of the courts in Hinds.

“Oh, gosh,” says Tim. “You’ve got the justice court, misdemeanor courts, you got the circuit court. And then you got the City of Jackson Court, over there with their police department. And then you got Clinton Municipal Court, the little City of Clinton. So there’s a lot of places.”

Tim twangs the other towns in Hinds: Raymond, Byram, Terry, Utica, Bolton, Edwards. They all have their own courts, too.

“I imagine once he was killed, everyone started talking,” I say. “And that’s how you found out about this affidavit in Hinds County. Do you think there are other ones?”

“That’s all I know,” says Tim. “And actually, Vincent’s attorney, Mr. Scott, he’s the one that leaked that to me about someone filing that against Mr. Barrett years ago. So he knows where it was. Now, I don’t know if he’s going to tell you. I didn’t tell you that. If you want to hit him back up for it, he’ll know.”