Rooting for the Death-Row Fugitive Guy

By Joel Stein

I know what you were thinking. You were thinking, "Run, Martin Gurule, run!" A violent double murderer was on the loose, and you were secretly on his side. Me too. I don't condone execution-style murder, and I'm down with the whole prison concept, but I just couldn't help it. I knew he could have been holding some single mother and her tiny baby hostage, but I couldn't help thinking that even though LuAnn and Junior would have driven him batty at first, by the end of the second day he would have been heating up bottles of milk and pointing his pistol at the phone receiver, and yelling at the operator for the number of the deadbeat dad.

For seven days they searched for Gurule while I wrestled with guilt both about my deranged fantasies and about the mid-seven figures I was hoping to get for this really neat screenplay I'm working on about his escape. I felt a little better when I found out a co-worker and several other friends were secretly rooting for him too. Even my grandmother, who I don't think is rooting for me, was pulling for that wily Gurule.

The Texas Death Row Fugitive Guy was so empathetic because he was an underdog: darkening his uniform with a pen, scaling two 10-ft., razor-studded fences, ducking a barrage of bullets, scampering through a marshy forest and evading more than 500 officers. Martin Gurule was a maverick with nothing left to lose up against a giant bureaucracy and some pretty cocky-sounding Texas prison officers, who were fooled by pillows he bunched together to make it look like him sleeping. Gurule was fighting the Man. He was messing with Texas. Are you getting this, Mr. Bruckheimer?

This wasn't the first time we've morally transgressed on a news story. Weren't you kind of hoping the ATF-Koresh standoff would go on forever? And--at least when he was the sunglassed gangster in the hoodie and not the Manson-like recluse--the Unabomber? And Desmond Pfeiffer? Maybe I'm alone on that one.

How do we reconcile this with our essential goodness, or at least my essential goodness? How's this: We rooted for Gurule not because we cared about him but because it made a good story. While we may convince ourselves that we read the newspaper to become informed members of a democracy, we really read it for stories. I didn't want the Texas Fugitive Guy to re-enter society. I just wanted the chase to drag out into a page-turning action-mystery. Or a romantic tearjerker. Or any of those Blockbuster categories.

When Gurule was found dead on Thursday in a river a mile from the prison by two off-duty prison guards who were fishing, I was relieved, because if he had made it out of the woods and killed people, this column would have made me feel really bad. But I mostly felt stupid for picturing him hunting squirrels with sharp rocks when he couldn't even cross a river. Then again, how dumb were those 500 officers not to look there? Were they still investigating the pillows?

I wanted the story to last a little longer, though. I know it wasn't cheap for the state of Texas to bring us four days of entertainment, but it had to be a bargain compared with the $90 million Universal spent on Meet Joe Black. I see Nick Cage as Gurule and Courtney Love as LuAnn. My phone lines are open.