Dale Jameton sat at the wheel of the pickup, the radio console glowing in his face, a freezer bag full of meth between him and his girlfriend. He looked in the rearview mirror this hot, muggy August night in 2006, at the trail of cops who had been following them since Corsicana. He gunned the truck to 85, barreling down Interstate 45, some 30 minutes outside of Dallas. With his free hand, he opened the bag, scooped out a handful of meth and tossed it in his mouth. If he was going to do this, he needed to be high.
He glanced at his girlfriend. Jennifer Lee McClellan was small, just 5-foot-3 and 135 pounds, with a sturdy build and long brown hair. Her milky white skin was a bit smudged after a day and a half on the run, like a porcelain doll that had been left outside. She had three daughters and a tan brick house in Mesquite. She was a good person, he believed, a hell of a lot better than he was. She put their song in the CD player, "My Best Friend" by Tim McGraw, and turned it up. He told her to put it on repeat. This might be their last ride.
His body told his story. Ten years in Texas prisons had chiseled him down to gristle and bone. His head was shaved to the scalp. His brooding eyes were ringed by shadows. The tattoos that covered his neck, his rippled forearms, his back and legs, he had earned in prison, some of them in maximum security. They were code to those who spoke the language of the underworld. The swastikas around his wrists, the flames on his forearms, the hate dots on his knuckles—they were all signals that he belonged to the Tip or, as it was more commonly known, the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. At 27 years old, he was already one of the highest-ranking members of the notorious prison gang.
As much as anything, prison had made him into who he was. He had spent his formative years behind bars, either in juvenile detention facilities or on the gladiator farms of the Texas prison system. He had gone in a petty criminal with a drug problem. He had come out a killer.
On August 1, 2006, he killed a man. He slit his throat, wrapped him in a chain-link fence and dumped him in the Trinity River bottoms. Not long after that, he had watched as an innocent woman was tortured, sexually assaulted and strangled in his kitchen. When it was over, he folded her body into a plastic tub, covered it with cement and dumped it in Lake Ray Hubbard.
Just now the Dallas police were closing in on all sides, sirens wailing. A helicopter hovered above, shining a spotlight on his truck. There wasn't much time. He put his truck in cruise, and McClellan leaned her head on his shoulder. He kissed her softly and promised himself he wouldn't let her die.
The drugs were kicking in. He was lit, 10-feet tall and bulletproof. The helicopter came within several feet of his windshield, blinding him with its spotlight. He let go of the wheel and covered his eyes.
As he neared Loop 12, he veered toward a median, hit the brakes and skidded to a halt, crashing into the concrete barrier. As smoke rose from under the hood, he took the pistol from his lap and loaded one round in the chamber. They wouldn't take him alive, he told McClellan. With what they had on him, he was looking at Death Row. McClellan asked for one last hug, and as they embraced, she took the gun from his hand and threw it out the window. He looked at her in shock. He didn't know whether to laugh out loud or cuss her out.
"I was ready to go out with guns blazing," Jameton would say later. "But she saved my life. She told me, 'I'm not going to let you die.'"
In addition to Jameton and McClellan, Dallas and Mesquite police arrested five other members of Jameton's Mesquite-based Aryan Brotherhood crew that day. The following day, on August 26, group leader Jason Hankins was found on the run in New Mexico. Seven, including Jameton and McClellan, were charged with the killing of Anthony Ormwell Clark, a 43-year-old who had met Hankins in a Fort Worth jail. Four, including Jameton and McClellan, were charged with the slaying of Breanna Taylor, a young Mansfield woman with no criminal record.
News of the grisly murders shocked residents of the quiet Mesquite neighborhood where Jameton and McClellan had lived. Even in Dallas, which has one of the highest crime rates in the United States, the case drew attention. The killings of Ormwell and Taylor were notable for their savagery, their level of sophistication and for what they suggested: The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas was no longer just a prison gang; it had invaded the suburbs.
Last month, Jameton struck a plea bargain with prosecutors. He agreed to plead guilty to both murders and receive two concurrent life sentences if the Dallas District Attorney's Office would drop the murder charges against McClellan. The rest of his crew is awaiting trial, which could begin this spring.
Jameton first spoke with me last November at the Dallas County Jail. We met twice more, over several hours, before he was transferred to Huntsville in December. During our conversations, he admitted to his participation in both murders. He talked about his childhood, why he joined the Aryan Brotherhood and why he was willing to take full responsibility for his crimes.
He showed no emotion when he described how he had killed Clark—and why. He seemed somewhat disturbed, however, about the part he played in disposing of Taylor's body.
"I don't get off on people's pain," he told me. "I might be homicidal; I've killed people. But you would kill people for certain reasons—to protect your family, to save someone's life. My morals are just different than yours."
The Aryan Brotherhood began in San Quentin in 1964 and has since mutated into more than a dozen prison-born white supremacist gangs including the Nazi Low-Riders, Public Enemy Number 1 and the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. These groups use race as a recruiting tool and as the basis of a twisted ideology. They formed in prisons as a means of survival and have since evolved into organized crime syndicates that operate both in and out of prison.
The original Aryan Brotherhood is especially brutal. As a federal case recently prosecuted in Los Angeles revealed, the gang maintains order through beatings, blood oaths, hangings, stabbings and decapitations. The point, in the end, is to gain power and money. In prison, power could be an office job instead of working in the fields; money is made through extortion rackets, pimping and smuggled contraband.
The Texas prison system, which houses more prison-born gangs than any other state except California, had, until the early 1980s, essentially one gang—and it operated with the blessing of the state. While not a gang in name, the mostly white building tenders, or BTs, ran the cellblocks the way any gang would—with baseball bats and knives. Prison guards did not enter the cellblocks without their escort. The system, both medieval and Old South, saved the state money, and if there were abuses along the way, that was the cost of keeping order.
That ended in 1980, when federal Judge William Wayne Justice ordered the state to change the system. He did so with a warning. The state needed to hire new guards, he said, and if it didn't, prison gangs would fill the power vacuum.
Justice was right. Suddenly white inmates, whom the BT system had protected for years, were the minority, thanks largely to newly implemented drug laws that disproportionately locked up blacks and Latinos. To protect themselves, white prison gangs began to organize. The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, which had permission from the original California-based Aryan Brotherhood to form, would become the largest and the most ruthless. In 1983 and 1984, 52 inmates were killed in Texas prison gang violence.
"A lot of those murders were committed by the Aryan Brotherhood, which was seeking to establish itself," says Terry Pelz, a former Texas Department of Criminal Justice warden who worked at the Retrieve Unit. "I saw convicts die in front of me. Eventually, we learned how to confirm gang members and we separated them, and the violence abated."
Now in its second generation, the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas is the fourth-largest prison-born gang in Texas. There are an estimated 400 members in the state, with 225 in the Dallas area.
"They are an organized entity, with a blood-in, blood-out oath, and are working against us completely," says Sig Sanchez, who tracks prison gangs for TDCJ. "They hate us. Any policies we put in place to protect offenders, they'll go against. Wherever they can make money, wherever they can cause problems, they'll do it."
While the Texas prison system has found ways to mitigate the damage the gang inflicts, they cannot keep its leaders from ordering hits from prison. Even more alarming, the ABT has spread outside prison walls. Its second generation includes members born and bred into the gang.
"In a sense, they are like clans," says Mark Pitcavage, who tracks white supremacist gangs for the Anti-Defamation League. "They refer to each other as family and tell each other that they love each other...They build allegiance to the group that is stronger than anything else."
Since 1985, when TDCJ officials seized letters outlining plans to kill 50 of the gang's enemies on the outside, the ADL has been compiling a greatest hits list of the gang's criminal activity beyond prison walls. Highlights include the '91 stabbing of a black Marine in Brazoria County, death threats sent in '97 to a Bexar County district judge and the '99 stabbing of a black inmate in a Bowie County Jail. They have also partnered with other prison gangs, such as the Mexican Mafia, to move drugs and guns and to carry out murder plots across Texas.
Locally, the ABT has been especially active, beginning with the 1997 execution-style killings of two women and one man in a Lake Highlands drug deal. In October 2001, ABT member Mark Stroman, aka The Superior One, walked into a Mesquite convenience store and killed two Middle Eastern-looking convenience store clerks in retaliation for 9/11. And in 2005, Stephen Lance Heard, whom prosecutors say was affiliated with the ABT, killed Fort Worth police officer Hank Nava when Nava tried to execute a search warrant on Heard's mobile home. Last November, the FBI released a bulletin warning the Dallas police that the ABT was asking its members who had once worked as police informants to gather the names and addresses of local police officers to put in a database.
"I think the scariest thing about this group is their total disrespect for law enforcement," Pitcavage says. "They do not care if they are sent to prison. They are not afraid to die. That is especially frightening if you become one of their targets."
While the Dallas Police Department and other law enforcement agencies consider the Aryan Brotherhood more of an organized crime outfit than a hate group, Pitcavage says members remain committed to a racist ideology and are willing to die for it. "At the group level and at the formal level they were founded on the basis of white supremacy. They pledge allegiance to the 14 Words, and anybody who refers to the 14 Words is a committed white supremacist."
The 14 Words—"We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."—was coined by David Lane, one of the founding members of a white supremacist group known as The Order, which claimed it was dedicated to deliver "our people from the Jew and bring total victory to the Aryan Race." The Order was involved in car hijackings, murder, counterfeiting money and organizing militaristic training camps—all with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government.
The ABT is different from other white supremacists because they are willing to suppress their virulent racism in the interest of making a profit, adds Pitcavage. "They will work with other races to do crime that benefits their race, but they still maintain their white supremacist attitude."
According to a June 2007 report by the Department of Justice, the ABT is active in narcotics trafficking in the Houston areas of Baytown, Beaumont/Port Arthur and Montgomery County. FBI intelligence suggests the ABT also controls a large piece of the meth trade in Dallas, San Antonio and Austin. And the ABT is now moving into white-collar crime, specifically identity theft and mortgage fraud, Pitcavage says. "These guys are primarily opportunistic, and they will find different ways to make money."
Such was the case in the summer of 2006, when Dale Clayton Jameton moved into a Mesquite neighborhood. Tattoos and shaved head notwithstanding, he didn't arouse the suspicions of many of his neighbors, who had no idea what they were in for.
From the time he was a boy growing up in Harris County, Jameton's life seemed marked for crime. His dad, a Vietnam vet, had been a member of the Bandidos motorcycle gang, as was his uncle. "But that was when I was young," Jameton told me.
He said he was introduced to alcohol at the age of 6 when his uncle talked him out of his allowance money to split a six-pack of beer with him. At 10, he started smoking weed, and by 13 he was shooting cocaine. At 16, he was caught delivering drug paraphernalia to his uncle's meth lab in San Antonio. Back in Harris County, he was robbing houses, pawning what he stole, getting high. He was sent to a 90-day Harris County boot camp—his first of many incarcerations over the next 10 years.
In 2000, a robbery conviction sent Jameton to the Garza West Unit in South Texas. He only lasted four months there before being transferred to Polunsky, a maximum-security facility in Livingston that houses Death Row inmates and security threats.
Polunsky has a reputation as one of the toughest places to do time in Texas. A year after Jameton left the unit, a Hispanic inmate was stabbed to death and another severely beaten in a brawl between rival prison gangs. Notorious ABT members such as Mark Stroman were housed there on Death Row. Inmates in administrative segregation, which included confirmed ABT members such as Jameton, complained there was no air conditioning in their cells; that their sinks were often broken, forcing them to brush their teeth and shave with toilet water; and that they were sometimes taken from their cells, handcuffed and shackled, and stripped naked in a group of 50 or 60 inmates for weapons checks. Recreation was one hour each day. The rest of the time was spent in a 6-by-10-foot cell with one window the size of a license plate.
"I've had a hard life, man," Jameton told me. "I just think I've been lucky to survive some of the things I've been through."
Jameton wouldn't say when or why he joined the Aryan Brotherhood—maintaining that getting into the specifics of how the group functioned could get him killed. "I joined for protection," he said. "Prison is a racist environment. And whether you like it or not, you'll be racist when you get out."
Rather than a racist, Jameton said, he considers himself a separatist, meaning he believes the races should never intermarry or even mix. While Jameton would not speak in depth about the ideology or structure of the Aryan Brotherhood, the ADL's Pitcavage says Jameton would have pledged allegiance to its constitution, which stresses solidarity. Family business should never be shared with outsiders. Dissenters would be punished. Potential members, or prospects, had to be sponsored and would only be admitted after being watched for some time within the prison system. Rank within the organization must be respected, and advancement comes only after years of membership. Dues must be paid to superiors. All orders must be followed without question.
"In order to join, they make you go through hell," says Pitcavage. "At first if you try to associate with them, you're not even a prospect. They send you on missions to prove yourself, doing their dirty work. Then you might become a prospect, and then a member. It's not like a militia group where overnight you become a colonel. It's more like the mafia, with captains and capos, where you have to earn rank."
By the time Jameton, also known as Tiger, left prison, he had attained the rank of major in the ABT. If he lacked direction or purpose before coming to prison, he now had both.
It only took seven months following his release from prison in November 2004 before Jameton was in trouble again. Arrested in Ellis County for possession of methamphetamine, he served another 400 days behind bars. A month after this prison stay, he was back in jail on another drug charge, this time in Dallas County.
But July 23, 2006, he made bond, which was paid for by Jennifer McClellan, whom he had only met once. Jameton found this suspicious—maybe she was a cop or a snitch—but after ABT member Courtland "Rabbit" Edmonds vouched for her, Jameton began to trust her, and they quickly fell for each other.
Before long, Jameton began living at McClellan's house on Duvall Drive in an otherwise peaceful Mesquite neighborhood. Like Jameton, McClellan had a troubled past. She had her first of three daughters at the age of 17, Jameton told me. Because of a Child Protective Services intervention, the girls lived with McClellan's mother, although McClellan was attending court-mandated parenting and substance abuse classes that summer in an attempt to get them back.
Jameton and McClellan partied in low-budget motels in Mesquite with other Aryan Brotherhood members, mostly smoking dope. "We were falling in love," Jameton said. "I could see her becoming my old lady."
That summer, Jason Hankins, an Aryan Brotherhood general, was released on bond from the Tarrant County Jail on a weapons charge. Just 32 years old, he already was a member of the Wheel, the five-member commission that ruled the ABT from prison.
Hankins phoned Jameton to pick him up from jail, and when Jameton arrived in Fort Worth, Hankins introduced him to Anthony Ormwell Clark—Gino—a man Hankins had met in jail. Clark, who was 43 at the time, said he had known Jameton's father and his uncle from their days riding with the Bandidos—he said he had even met Jameton when he was a boy. Jameton didn't recall any of this, pulling Hankins aside and telling him something wasn't right about Clark. He figured Clark was a con artist who wanted to profit off the Aryan Brotherhood, or worse, that he was a cop or an informant. Clark claimed he owned a strip club and that he was a heavy player in the Dallas drug world. Problem was, Jameton knew the real owner of that strip club.
Before long, Clark was starting to affect business. Drug associates who had known Jameton for years split. Business was coming to halt. Jameton said that he pulled Clark aside and gave him a warning, telling Clark to not come around the gang anymore. But Clark didn't listen.
On August 1, 2006, Clark's girlfriend called Hankins to tell him Clark was in a hospital in Bedford. Clark had been doing GHB, and the drug had dehydrated him, causing him to pass out. Hankins and Jameton had borrowed Clark's Ford Explorer, and his girlfriend wondered if they could go pick him up from the hospital.
They did, bringing Clark to McClellan's house, where members of the brotherhood were having a barbecue. Something in Jameton snapped, and he decided it was time to kill Clark. He took Clark out to the back porch and beat him unconscious. A neighbor across the alley witnessed the beating, according to a police report.
Jameton then lugged Clark into the Explorer and laid him across the back seat. He drove to a friend's house nearby, where he grabbed a tarp, chain-link fencing and cinder blocks. He dragged Clark out of the truck, rolled him in the tarp and fencing, and then weighed his body down with the cinder blocks before pulling him into the back of the Explorer. While Jameton told me he acted alone, Mesquite police believe he had help from three associates: Richard Mann (Okie), Hankins and Edmonds (Rabbit), who lived at the house where the body was prepared.
Once he had the body in the Explorer, Jameton drove to the Trinity River bottoms, swam Clark out to the middle of a fishing pond and slit his throat. Five days later, a fisherman found his bloated, decomposing body. It would not be identified for three weeks.
Jameton told me he felt no remorse or guilt about the murder. The way he saw it, he had done the right thing: He warned Clark, and Clark didn't listen. If Clark was a cop or a snitch like Jameton suspected, his actions could be hurting the brotherhood, to which Jameton had allegiance above all else. According to the code he lived by, he had no choice but to kill.
Not all brothers took their oath of loyalty as devoutly as Jameton did. In a written confession given to the Mesquite police on August 25, 2006, ABT associate Devarin Manuel implicated Jameton in the murder of Breanna Taylor.
According to Manuel's confession, Taylor had been "bad-mouthing" the brotherhood and was taken to McClellan's house around August 20, where she was beaten, sexually tortured and strangled. The torture lasted for two and a half hours.
Taylor's friend Brandy Lewis would later describe Taylor as an "All-American girl," who had dreamed of marrying her high school sweetheart. Lewis told WFAA-Channel 8 reporter Rebecca Lopez that when Taylor's boyfriend broke up with her, Taylor fell into depression and stopped showing up for her job at a Mansfield gas station. And then she disappeared.
Jameton told me Taylor had no association with the Aryan Brotherhood and that her killing was a mistake. He would also claim he didn't participate in the murderand that McClellan was in a back room sleeping while it occurred. It was Manuel who tied her up, he said, and started beating her in the kitchen of McClellan's home.
"The whole thing wasn't supposed to be a murder," Jameton said. "Devan had done all this bullshit in my living room. I took him out to the garage and told him, 'If you let that girl go now, we're all going to go to jail. You better take care of it.'"
Jameton said that while it was Manuel who had killed her, Jameton alone disposedof the body.
But Manuel's confession has Jameton intricately involved in the brutal murder—the details of which reveal the level of violence and depravity to which Jameton could sink.
According to the confession, ABT member Chad Williams, aka Youngster, was ordered to take Taylor to McClellan's house. "When Brianna got there, Tiger [Jameton] had Jennifer beat her up," he wrote. "Jennifer was telling Brianna that she was bad-mouthing the organization. Then Tiger started asking what he should do to her. Tiger started torturing her." Jameton stripped Taylor naked and later forced her to perform oral sex on Manuel. "Tiger and Youngster then hooked Brianna up to a battery charger and shocked her," wrote Manuel. "She was screaming and gagging and Youngster kicked her in the mouth and she started to bleed...Then we walked into the garage and Tiger told me that I was going to finish her off. We knew she couldn't be let go." Together, Manuel and Jameton choked her with a zip-tie, said Manuel. "It took 20 or 30 minutes for her to die."
After cleaning up the crime scene, Youngster, upon Jameton's orders, put the body in a plastic tub, which Jameton filled with concrete, said Manuel. They loaded the container into McClellan's truck and drove to Lake Ray Hubbard. Using a boat they got through one of Youngster's connections, they ran the container out to the dam. While Manuel and Youngster steadied the boat, Jameton dumped the body into the lake.
Things were quickly spiraling out of control. In New Mexico, members were asking for permission to kill a cop. Hankins said no, but they kept asking, which aroused Jameton's suspicions that someone was trying to set them up. The feds had just successfully prosecuted a massive Aryan Brotherhood case in California, and it seemed their focus had now shifted to Texas. On top of that, Jameton figured that it was only a matter of time before the cops would come knocking on his door, asking about Clark's murder. He planned to escape to New Mexico, where an ABT member had a secure compound in the mountains near Albuquerque.
But first Jameton had a debt to collect.
In the early morning hours of August 25, he and McClellan showed up at the house of two men who Jameton claimed dealt drugs for him. Holding guns to their heads, Jameton took $700, a 52-inch plasma TV and a .357 Magnum—all in partial payment of the $5,000 he said they owed him. He then forced the men into his truck, and drove them to an ATM, but when the machine limited their withdrawals to $300 each, Jameton decided he would hold them at McClellan's house until he was paid in full. As they drove to McClellan's house, he duct-taped their eyes shut so they wouldn't know where he lived and put zip-ties around their necks to keep them from running.
"I never planned to kill them," Jameton would later tell me. "I was just going to hold them until they came up with the money."
As they approached McClellan's house, Jameton could see that the police had it surrounded. "Be cool," he told McClellan, who was driving. "Let's make a right."
They continued on Pioneer Road until they came to a baseball field that sits in the shadow of I-20. He had McClellan stop the truck, and he then led his two blindfolded captives into the park.
"I want you both to walk until you hit a tree," he told them. "Look, you're not walking off a cliff, I promise. Just walk in this field, and when you hit a tree you can stop."
Jameton jumped back in the car, and he and McClellan drove to a motel in Palmer where they watched the news hoping to learn what information the police had on them. A few hours later, they headed for New Mexico, but not before detouring to Dallas to answer the phone call of a brother who was in trouble. On their way, the Dallas police would give chase, causing them to wreck near Loop 12, and once McClellan threw Jameton's gun out the window, they would surrender.
Earlier that same day, police had caught Williams on Lawson Road, after he had eluded them during a 30-minute car chase. Police arrested Edmonds near his home on Shepherd Lane where Mesquite police say Jameton prepared Clark's body for disposal. In all, a half-dozen members of the brotherhood were arrested, including their leader, Jason Hankins, whom police found on August 26 in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He was later named in a federal indictment in New Mexico, alleging that he and 11 others, including Edmonds, had conspired to kill a police officer.
Despite their blood oaths and vows to never snitch on each other, Williams and Manuel confessed to participating in the murder of Breanna Taylor and implicated each other and Jameton and McClellan in the process. Jameton also confessed but later recanted, claiming a Dallas detective coerced him into a confession by threatening to prosecute McClellan for murder.
"They don't know what the fuck to believe," Jameton told me during one of our conversations. "I'm a liar. Only I know the real truth about what happened."
On a cold day in early December, I visited Dale Jameton for the last time. He was led to the visiting room by two burly guards, who were on high alert. During his stay in the Dallas County Jail, Jameton had already assaulted one guard, and there was no reason to believe he wouldn't do it again.
Once he was secured in the interview room, the guards took off his cuffs. He seemed in good spirits. As we talked, he passed me some court papers that he felt would help me tell his story, including Manuel's written confession of the Taylor killing. I filled in some of the blanks in his family history and got the phone number of an aunt who could put me in touch with his mother. When I later called the number, it was disconnected.
Two days before our conversation, he had pleaded guilty to both murders. In exchange, prosecutors dropped the murder charge against McClellan, who Jameton now claims as his common-law wife. I asked him why he did this; all of his co-defendants are taking their chances and going to trial.
"I could've taken it to trial, and I could've beat it," he said. "But I didn't want to take that chance of Jennifer going down." He ticked off the things she had done for him. Bonding him out of jail. Giving him a home. Saving his life when he wanted to go out with guns blazing. "What kind of person would I be if I let her ride on a fall?"
Besides, he said, she had something to live for: her kids. She received a 10-year sentence for the aggravated robbery of the two men Jameton said owed him money. The capital murder charge for Taylor's killing was reduced to aggravated assault, a charge that will also carry 10 years. The sentences will run concurrently. The way Jameton figures it, she's already done two years of back time in the Dallas County Jail. "Another year and a half and she'll be up for parole," he said. "Really, man, I'm just about as happy as I can be. I knew I wasn't coming home. Just to put her out there on the street, to see her kids and her grandmother again."
McClellan declined to comment for this story, as did Breanna Taylor's family. Police investigators said they were unaware of any family that Clark had. Courtland Ray Edmonds, through his mother, initially agreed to an interview and then declined. Several other defendants, including Hankins and Mann, mulled interview requests before ultimately declining.
Joe DeCorte, a private investigator who is assisting the district attorney in prosecuting these cases, told me that Jameton cut the deal not to save McClellan but to save himself. Jameton had implicated other Aryan Brotherhood members in his original confession to Mesquite police, said DeCorte, and now he was marked for death.
"That's bullshit, man," Jameton told me. "I told my homeboys what I said—they were pissed. I said, 'What can I do to fix it?' So I wrote another affidavit and cleared them all. I'm in good standing."
In one breath he spoke about his love for McClellan, in another he told me, "We would all kill for somebody."
I brought up the Taylor killing, a subject he had avoided during our two previous visits.
"That shit was messed up," he said. "I had nightmares about that shit."
He wouldn't say why she was killed but said it ripped him up the day he pleaded guilty to her murder and then had to listen to her parents as they each read from their victim's impact statement. "She didn't deserve to die," he said.
Still, he didn't stop it. He disposed of the body. Does he regret that?
"Yeah," he said, nodding. "I have dreams where I'm drowning and she's swimming up to me."
His voice trailed off. He ran a hand over the stubble on his head. "I know where the body is. If they would let me out for just a couple hours I could help them find it. It would bring some closure for her poor family. They've been through hell."
I asked him how he felt about spending the rest of his life in prison. He said it hadn't hit him yet, though he figured he had no chance of parole, and in all likelihood would do his time in administrative segregation, unless he renounced his membership in the Aryan Brotherhood. He told me he wouldn't do that. He is committed to the Aryan Brotherhood for life.
