The day Gary Graham was executed and troops of media and protesters camped out in front of the prison, Jacob was working at a nearby bar. Sports was on one TV and the news was on another, showing Jesse Jackson standing on the steps of the Walls amid hundreds of protesters. At one point, Jacob caught a glimpse of his father standing outside the prison. Jacob's boss came in and said there were several calls for him. One was a scout with good news: He'd been drafted by the Yankees (he decided to go to college instead). The other calls were from local reporters.
Then, Jim Willett, having stepped away from the melee for a moment to use the phone, called to congratulate him. "He told me he loved me, that he was proud of me," Jacob says.
MARK GRAHAM
Jim Willet was warden of the Walls Unit for three years. The executions were never easy, he says. "The hardest were the young fellows. You think, there's a young man who ruined someone's life and ruined his own, and he probably could have really been something."
MARK GRAHAM
All executions in Texas since 1924 have been carried out in a small room in the state prison in Huntsville.
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While he has had brief conversations with his father about the executions, it's not something he likes to bring up. "If he has bad recollections about it, I don't want to be the one to talk about it," he says. "I'd much rather talk about baseball or something."
If Willett struggled to cope with the impact of presiding over the deaths of 89 people and being there for their last moments, he didn't talk about it much to anyone. "Jim's pretty unflappable–whatever turmoil he's feeling inside, he's not going to show that," says Wayne Scott, Willett's old friend. "Jim was much more concerned about his staff than he was about himself–that's just the sort of person he is." Willett was careful to rotate officers involved in the executions as much as he could, giving them breaks. And he always made sure they knew there were counselors available if they needed to talk.
In 2000, when Texas set a record for the number of inmates put to death in one year–40–Willett and his employees participated in a National Public Radio documentary called Witness to an Execution. He ended up narrating it himself, and the haunting and evocative piece won a Peabody Award.
As a lover of history and a longtime expert when it comes to the Texas prison system, Willett opens the broadcast with a description of the death house, the site of all state executions since 1924. "We've carried out a lot of executions here lately, and with all the debate about the death penalty, I thought this might be a good time to let you hear exactly how we do these things," he says. "Sometimes I wonder whether people really understand what goes on down here and the effect it has on us."
Of the comments from nearly a dozen prison guards, chaplains and reporters who witnessed large numbers of executions, some of the most telling come from Jim Brazzil, the chaplain who worked under Willett and had by the time of the broadcast been with 114 inmates while they were put to death. "I usually put my hand right below their knee, you know, and I usually give 'em a squeeze, let 'em know I'm right there," Brazzil says. "You can feel the trembling, the fear that's there, the anxiety that's there. You can feel the heart surging, you know. You can see it pounding through their shirt." Later in the piece, he talks about his last interactions with inmates before they passed out. "One of 'em would say, 'I just want to tell you thank you.' One of 'em would say, 'Don't forget to mail my letters.' Another one would say, 'Just tell me again–is it gonna hurt?' One of them would say, 'What do I do when I see God?' You've got 45 seconds and you're trying to tell the guy what to say to God?"
One of the voices in the NPR story belongs to Fred Allen, a former officer on the tie-down team who participated in about 120 executions. He resigned after a mental breakdown. "I was just working in the shop and all of a sudden something just triggered in me and I started shaking," he says. His wife asked him what was wrong, and he started to weep uncontrollably. "All of these executions all of a sudden all sprung forward. Just like taking slides in a film projector and having a button and just pushing a button and just watching, over and over: him, him, him...You see I can barely even talk because I'm thinking more and more of it. You know, there was just so many of 'em."
The broadcast closes with Willett as he looks forward to retiring. "To tell you the truth, this is something I won't miss a bit," he says. "There are times when I'm standing there, watching those fluids start to flow, and wonder whether what we're doing here is right. It's something I'll be thinking about for the rest of my life."
As Willett leads me through the museum and recounts his time in the death chamber, he mentions that usually when an inmate was lying on the gurney he would ask the man if the straps were too tight. "It's about making the inmate comfortable," he says. I ask if he thinks it's ironic that he would try to make a man comfortable right before signaling the executioner to kill him. He looks at me for a moment and nods. "It's ironic as heck!" he says.
