Manifest Injustice (16 page)

From then on, his various trips to Phoenix and other places were sometimes escorted, sometimes not. The escorted trips usually came about because one of the guards, Jim Piekarz, a Jaycee member, enjoyed the outings. When going together, they took Piekarz’s personal car; when alone, Bill drove a prison pickup. Macumber also started visiting other prisons in the state, reporting on and recruiting for the Jaycees. On a few evenings, he and Piekarz even stopped to visit Macumber’s parents and have dinner, the guard right there at the table with his family. Things were quite relaxed back then—that’s the only way Macumber could explain the situation years later.

The Outside Trustee Unit had its own Jaycee chapter, ASPOT Jaycees, headed by Paul LaBarre, a onetime civilian Jaycee in Phoenix, now a prisoner with five consecutive sentences for robbery. He asked Macumber to join his chapter as well, and Bill agreed. LaBarre also asked Macumber to come work with him at the Florence Complex’s TV studio, which he ran. Bill jumped at the opportunity; after a year on the plumbing job, he’d had his fill of cleaning plugged sewer lines. LaBarre began teaching him the TV business—installation and maintenance and the technical aspects of transmission over a closed circuit. For Macumber, it felt like going to college all over again.

LaBarre had yet another project for Macumber. The Florence prison ran the Outlaw Rodeo, an annual three-day event attended by both free-world and inmate cowboys. The prison administrators had staged this themselves in 1983 and 1984—and had lost money both years. So they handed it to the ASPOT Jaycees in 1985. Working together, LaBarre and Macumber pulled it off, showing a profit of more than $36,000, most of it donated to charities such as Special Olympics, the Make-a-Wish Foundation and the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon. By the next year, LaBarre was gone, released, and Macumber found himself serving as president of the ASPOT Jaycees, director of the Florence TV studio and chairman of the 1986 Prison Outlaw Rodeo. He knew he could run the Jaycees and the TV studio—in fact, that year he designed and implemented a new state-of-the-art closed-circuit satellite television system for Florence. But he wasn’t certain about staging a profitable three-day rodeo on his own.

He began by making a number of trips to Phoenix to sell advertising for the rodeo magazine, something that had not been done before. Then, using a stray truckload of forty-foot-long steel pipes, he saw a way for the Roadrunners to install lights on the Florence prison rodeo grounds, so they could have an evening performance as well as the afternoon rodeos on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Over a weekend, a crew of forty Jaycee inmates, working around the clock, assembled the pipes into ten tall poles equipped with crossbars, lights and wiring. Inmate ingenuity, they called it. With an evening performance and magazine advertising to go along with the usual entry fees, ticket sales and snack bar proceeds, they cleared just over $70,000—all but $2,500 again donated to charities.

When Macumber finally stepped down as president of his Jaycee chapter, he became editor of the Arizona Jaycee newspaper and special adviser to the state Jaycee president. In that role he traveled throughout Arizona, speaking and teaching at street and prison chapters, civic groups and high schools. He also took a job, for Arizona Correctional Industries, overseeing the two inmate crews that installed ACI-produced furniture in the Peoria school district. In his spare time, he converted a reach of high desert outside the prison into arable farmland and taught inmates how to grow their own crops. He arranged, as well, for a local sundry store in Florence to sell inmates’ artwork and handicrafts. Newspapers in Arizona were now publishing feature articles about him.

*   *   *

Macumber eventually realized he was earning a PhD in people. In prison, he met so many types. He learned to evaluate rather than judge, focusing on how people spoke, what they said, their expressions and tone. He could goof around with anyone. He could kid, challenge, give them trouble. As time went on, he became a kind of counselor and mediator for the younger inmates, parenting and teaching and policing, as needed. Some of the teaching took place in the yard and the dayroom, some in formal classes—among others, he taught courses in spiritual development, planning techniques and management development, offering each class several times, with nearly four hundred inmates participating overall. The mediating and settling of disputes among inmates often happened at the request of the warden. Prisoners and guards alike came to venerate him. During visitation hours on Sundays, inmates at other tables would bring their families to meet Macumber, explaining to their relatives how much Bill had changed their lives, how much they cared about him, how much they’d do for him. Macumber would always beam and shake hands and toss a line to their parents:
I give him trouble, but he deserves it.

When alone, Macumber would write—pages and pages of poetry, essays and fiction. Over time, the pages became books: twenty-four novels (mysteries, adventures, westerns), four children’s novellas, a nonfiction history, a collection of poems. The poems kept coming, twenty-six hundred in all. Sixteen won poetry contests; eleven made it into anthologies.

A good deal of Macumber’s writing stayed as typed pages, but
History’s Trail
, his collection of poems about the Arizona desert, was published in a limited edition in 1984. It sold more than five thousand copies at the Florence store he helped establish, and remains available at various Arizona public and university libraries. Macumber included a dedication page: “I dedicate this work with pride and love to my three sons, Scott, Steve and Ron Macumber.” At the time, he had not seen or heard from his boys in nine years.

*   *   *

Despite all his activity and achievement in prison, Macumber had never stopped trying to win his freedom. With the legal appeals to the courts exhausted, no funds for a lawyer and no possibility of parole, he looked to the Arizona Board of Pardons and Paroles for clemency, filing an application in the early summer of 1983, when he was forty-seven. This panel did not concern itself with questions of guilt or innocence; it assumed that verdicts were correct, sentences fair. Its purpose, rather, at least in cases such as Macumber’s, was to recommend commutation of sentences when the board members saw mitigating circumstances—usually a prisoner’s demonstration of remorse and rehabilitation. They were, in other words, dispensers of grace and mercy—to those who repented.

Macumber, though, could not seek mercy based on remorse and rehabilitation, since he, as always, maintained his innocence. He filled out the form as best he could. Asked in one section to explain why he felt entitled to a change in sentence, he wrote, “First, because I was in no way involved with the crime for which I was convicted, and secondly because additional incarceration will have no positive bearing on my future actions and only inhibit the positive contributions I could make in the free world. Finally, I pose no threat whatsoever to any member of society.” Asked to describe his involvement in the crimes that had put him in prison, Macumber simply wrote, “I was not involved with or in the crime for which I was convicted.”

Mainly, he documented all he had accomplished in prison over the previous four years. Macumber’s prison counselor added a confidential progress report: “I have only seen this resident once, his file is exemplary. His file reveals and substantiates his writing capabilities. He is calm, courteous and cooperative during interviews.” In further support, Macumber enclosed copies of two newspaper feature articles written about him; a pile of glowing letters from Arizona Jaycee officers and members; another pile from former neighbors, friends and colleagues; copies of his awards, commendations and certificates; samples of his poetry and a list of the prizes they’d won; and an inventory of all the writing he’d completed so far. One particularly compelling letter came from a fellow inmate in North Unit whom Macumber had recruited to be a Roadrunner vice president. “It has been my privilege to know Bill Macumber since September of 1979,” wrote Cleatus G. King. He continued:

Over the years Bill and I have become close personal friends. Bill and I come from two entirely different worlds. He from the stable, citizen-type world and I from a totally criminal kind of environment. I have never, in all my life, been involved in any type of activity even remotely resembling the Jaycees. I would have thought such a thing to be extremely funny had someone even suggested such a thing. I was finding it difficult to stay out of trouble for two days at a time let alone get involved in something as straight as Jaycees.

In 1979, Bill moved from the Central Unit to the North Unit and I followed a few months later. Not long after I arrived there the Roadrunners Chapter was chartered and Bill managed to talk me into joining. Bill became our first President and I, somehow, managed to get myself elected to the Internal Vice President’s position.… Bill has a management and business background and he began to school me in both management and his personal philosophies. Strangely enough, I began to notice a change in myself. Slowly but surely I was stepping away from the outlaw and towards the kind of man who was my friend and that I was learning from.…

Now we are into our third year and I again find myself on the Board as Internal VP.… I have managed to become a model convict by the administration’s description and I attribute this directly to Bill Macumber. The difference between myself now and what I was a few years back is like night and day, and the same applies to many men in this Chapter.… Myself and many others can clearly attest to the interest and faith that Bill Macumber has placed in so many of us.… I would respectfully like to submit his name to you for your consideration.

In the final sections of his application, Macumber spoke directly on his own behalf. “I was in no way involved in the double murder for which I was convicted…,” he wrote. “I did not know either of the victims nor did I have any motive for committing these crimes. A man by the name of Ernest Valenzuela confessed to this crime in front of four different witnesses and had a motive for this crime. There are also signed statements from an eyewitness who was present when the crime was committed. All of this information is a matter of public record … however it was never heard or known to be in existence [by] the jury.… I realize that the vast majority of people convicted of crimes make this same statement, yet the fact remains that some of them are telling the truth, and that truth has been supported in later years.… I firmly believe the same thing will happen in my case.”

Macumber pointed out that he had never been in trouble with the law before his conviction, not even a traffic ticket. He invited the board to compare his activities and efforts to help others before and since his incarceration: “You will see that my interests and motivations have not changed … I am the same man I have always been.… My lifestyle and personality has remained constant since my teens.” He also invited the board to consider certain assumptions.

Assumption No. 1: “If I am in fact guilty of the crimes for which I have been convicted, then you have to believe that for a few short seconds out of my forty-seven years I became a totally different man and for no known reason murdered two people that I did not know. I would have then had to immediately change back to my former self and continue my life for twelve years until my alleged crime was uncovered.”

Assumption No. 2: “If I am in fact guilty of these crimes then I have managed to totally fool everyone including my family, friends, associates and members of the staff of D.O.C. for a total of twenty-one years, because these crimes were committed back in May of 1962.”

Assumption No. 3: “That I am in fact not guilty of the crimes for which I was convicted, sentenced and incarcerated and that I was (a) a victim of circumstance or (b) a victim of a concentrated effort to get me out of the way by my ex-wife and her associates.”

With that, Macumber concluded his petition by thanking the board “for taking the time to look through all of this information as well as the supportive documents that are included.”

Whether the board in fact looked through all the information cannot be said. Following usual procedure, the board held a preliminary Phase I commutation of sentence hearing, without the prisoner present, to decide whether to advance to a Phase II personal hearing. That decision, as conveyed to Macumber: “To DENY and NOT to pass you to a Phase II personal hearing at this time.”

Macumber tried again in November 1988, filing a second application for commutation of sentence. This time his letters of recommendation included enthusiastic paeans from the chief security officer for the prison’s North Unit (“He was traveling throughout the State of Arizona teaching personal development and attending various meetings.… Not once was he ever involved in a problem”); his ACI job supervisors (“He has had a major impact on the Florence Complex.… His leadership abilities have aided him in training other inmates, giving them a sense of worth and responsibility”); Charlie Dumar (“On many occasions I have sent Bill by himself to do various jobs. I have no problem with him leaving this facility alone.… If I was in business I would hire Bill without a second thought”); and the president of the Arizona Jaycees (“I consider it a privilege to write a letter for him and wish that I could do more.… If Bill was released today he would be welcome in my home or as my next door neighbor. I consider him to be a very special individual who cares a great deal for his fellow man”). Macumber included as well a formal commutation of sentence proposal, prepared by a professional criminal justice consultant hired by his father. “Mr. Macumber has maintained his innocence in this case from the very beginning,” the consultant wrote at the end of his proposal. “He is not asking the Board to rule on that issue.… Rather the issue is whether or not Mr. Macumber has satisfactorily demonstrated his ability to return to the community with minimum danger to others.”

Once more, the board rejected Macumber’s petition without advancing to the second stage: “It was the decision of the Board at your Phase I Commutation of Sentence Hearing on February 1, 1989, to DENY and NOT to pass you to a Phase II personal hearing at this time.”