A Life For A Life

By ADAM COHEN

If the barbaric dragging death of James Byrd Jr. were a movie--and at times it seemed like pure John Grisham--this was the scene that would have been certain to make it into the trailers. As a scowling John William King, 24, was led out of the Jasper County courthouse in shackles by Texas Rangers last week, reporters asked him if he had any message for the grieving Byrd family. It was a moment when, just briefly, repentance appeared possible. "Yeah," King sneered. He then invited the Byrds to perform a lewd sexual act.

There's a reason King's story feels like a legal thriller: its plot line is melodramatic and painfully one-dimensional. The murder of Byrd is as horrific a crime as can be imagined--chaining a man to a truck and dragging him three miles until he dies of his injuries. And the protagonist is a dime-store white supremacist, spouting anti-black and anti-Semitic dogma and spewing hatred to the bitter end. Last week a Jasper jury tacked a Hollywood ending onto King's life story, convicting him of first-degree murder and sentencing him to death by lethal injection.

It was a more satisfying resolution than many blacks had dared expect. East Texas, with its dusty small towns and cotton fields, is more Dixie than Lone Star. And the South hasn't been a place where blacks always found justice in the courtroom. In towns like Jasper, not long ago, blacks--even black lawyers--were routinely called by their first name in court, often excluded as jurors, their testimony discounted again and again. Black life was so cheap that whites almost never got the death penalty for killing blacks. After Byrd's murder, King gloated to an accomplice that "we have made history." He may just be right. If his death penalty is carried out, he will be the first white Texan executed for killing a black since slavery ended.

If ever a crime cried out for grave punishment, it's this one. King and two friends were driving a 1982 Ford pickup in the early-morning hours last June. They spotted Byrd, 49, an unemployed vacuum-cleaner salesman, walking home from a party on a lonely stretch of Highway 96 and offered him a ride. They drove him to a deserted corner of the backwoods and, after a struggle, chained him to the truck by his ankles. Then they dragged him for three miles along a rural road outside Jasper. Byrd was alive for the first two miles, a pathologist testified at trial, and deliberately twisted his body from side to side, trying to keep his head from hitting the pavement. He may have been conscious at the time of his death, when his head was finally torn off by a concrete drainage culvert. Lawmen later found Byrd's head and upper torso, including his right arm, shoulder and neck, in a ditch about a mile away from the rest of his body.

Byrd's murder was a heinous crime against a man and his family, but it was also something larger. Lynching is the iconic Old South crime, used to punish slave insurrections. Lynch mobs traditionally hanged their victim from a rope tossed over a tree limb. But dragging deaths were not uncommon, first from horses, later from cars and trucks. Lynching was at once a brutal act of vigilante injustice and a larger statement--a warning to blacks to remain subservient.

How does a child grow up to be John William King? Neither the nature nor the nurture crowd has an easy explanation. King was adopted as an infant into an apparently loving family, a brother to the Kings' two daughters. Ronald King's memories of his son's childhood are sweet. The elder King told the jury that he and his wife, who died shortly before her son's 16th birthday, "invested a lot of love in that boy."

John King grew up among blacks and went to school with them. (The black jury foreman was a classmate at Jasper High School.) King's life took a bad turn after his junior year of high school, when he was arrested for burglary--along with Shawn Berry, one of the two men with him in the pickup last June. The two were sent to boot camp together. Upon release, however, King violated probation and was given an eight-year prison term in July 1995.

King probably harbored some racist beliefs before he checked into Texas' 3,200-inmate, maximum-security Beto I unit. He already had a book on the Klan, stolen from his high school library. Michelle Chapman, 18, a friend, testified that she could see him becoming increasingly racist in the 10 letters he wrote her from prison between 1995 and 1997. His missives were full of vulgarities and racial slurs denouncing blacks, Jews, Hispanics and a variety of "race traitors." White women who date blacks are "whores," he said, and they should "hang from the same tree as their black boyfriends." At Beto, King shared a cell with Lawrence Brewer Jr., the third man in the pickup truck the night Byrd was killed.

Prisons are a breeding ground for groups like the Aryan Brotherhood and the Aryan Circle. When the Texas prisons were desegregated in the early 1980s, whites and blacks were spread evenly throughout the prison system. Blacks, who were 60% of the inmate population, became a dominant force in many cellblocks. It "helped the white-supremacy groups recruit because whites were the minority and were becoming victims," says Sammy Buentello, head of the Texas department of criminal justice's gang-management office. A former state-prison psychologist testified at trial that an assault by black inmates may have played a critical role in King's racist conversion. "My understanding of what turned this person around is that he was attacked," Dr. Walter Quijano testified. "That traumatized him and changed him dramatically."

King and Brewer joined a local prison chapter of a gang called the Confederate Knights of America, a small North Carolina-based Klan faction that recruited heavily from biker groups and prison inmates in the early 1990s. He began getting tattoos that would cover 65% of his body. His body art was a litany of racist images, including Nazi SS lightning bolts, Klan emblems and a black man lynched from a tree. One witness, psychiatrist Dr. Edward Gripon, suggested the tattoos may have been a way to make the 5-ft. 7-in., 165-lb. King look forbidding to threatening black inmates. By standing up to blacks, another witness said, he became part of a group known as "peckerwoods," whites who would not yield money or sexual favors to blacks.

During his time in jail, prosecutors say, King was making plans to form a Jasper chapter of the Confederate Knights of America, to be called the Texas Rebel Soldiers. Brewer was King's first recruit, the government says, and Berry was the second. William Matthew Hoover, a fellow inmate of King's and an Aryan Brotherhood member, testified that King may have been planning an initiation ritual for his new gang that included kidnapping a black man, driving him to the woods and killing him. "They have to take someone out," Hoover testified. "Blood in, blood out. You have to spill blood to get in, and you have to give blood to get out."

Before King left prison, he wrote in Hoover's prison album, calling him "my Aryan brother in arms" and inviting him to a party on July 4, 1998, the day he planned to form the Texas Rebel Soldiers. "And don't forget," King wrote, "a huge Wood gathering, BBQ and bashing on July 4." Hoover explained that a "bashing" meant killing a black man. King was by now in the process of becoming a white-supremacy polemicist. In his prison writings, he cast himself as a hero in a coming race war with racial minorities and Jews. He drafted proposed bylaws and recruiting letters for his new Klan chapter and expounded on the Aryans, whom he considered to be a "race of individuals who have found themselves existing on humanity's evolutionary plateau," who were "born with genetic capacity for great power, leadership, and knowledge."

When King got out of prison in 1997, he got to work planning the Independence Day kickoff for his Texas Rebel Soldiers. He wanted something to call attention to the group, prosecutors say, and what he had in mind was a racial killing. As it turned out, opportunity--in the form of Byrd ambling along the highway--presented itself a few weeks before July 4. It seemed precisely the kind of dramatic action King had been working toward. King dragged his victim's severed torso through a black part of town and dumped it near a black church and cemetery. He wanted Byrd's death to fulfill the traditional function of a lynching. "It was designed to strike terror into the community," a government witness said.

Jasper, which calls itself the Jewel of the Forest, is not a frozen-in-time, bigoted Southern town. Although it is 60% white, Mayor R.C. Horn and other influential political figures are black. But the killing had the potential to reopen a lot of wounds and set whites against blacks. That calm reigned is in significant part because of the Byrd family, which preached harmony and refused to blame the entire white community for the acts of three men. King's father, for his part, apologized to the Byrds for the murder. "Please pray for the Byrd family, who have endured unimaginable pain and loss," he said. At one point, one of Byrd's daughters embraced a sorrowing Ronald King and whispered, "It's not your fault."

The early signs from the courtroom were encouraging. The government put on a powerful case--a far cry from the days when Southern prosecutors found ways to lose--or not to bring--race cases like this one. The defense presented only three witnesses; its entire case lasted less than an hour. Although the jury had 11 whites and just one black, corrections officer Joe Collins, the sole black, was elected foreman. Jasper's black community hoped for the best but braced for the worst. "Even if you know something is right and that you should get a certain verdict, sometimes you don't get it," says Unav Wade, owner of a beauty salon on the courthouse square. "If it's between races, most likely the white person wins."

But this time the white person lost badly. The jury took only 2 1/2 hours to return the toughest verdict possible, capital murder. Jurors then listened to two days of penalty-phase testimony, which included a tearful plea for mercy from Ronald King. He arrived in court in a wheelchair, with an oxygen tube, needed because of his emphysema. Although some in the courtroom were visibly moved by this frail father's appeal, the jury unanimously voted for the death penalty. A critical factor, a juror said later, was that jail officials had recently found an 8-in. homemade knife in King's cell, and this indicated, the jury felt, that he was primed for more violence. Brewer and Berry, King's alleged accomplices, still face capital-murder charges of their own; their trial dates have not yet been set.

Whites joined blacks outside the courthouse to applaud the verdict. Some onlookers shouted "Bye-bye!" and "Rot in hell!" as King was led off to death row. "I hate to say people were happy, but they were," says Jasper Chamber of Commerce president Diane Domenech, who is white. "I feel like we stood together, black and white, and everyone's just as happy as the next one at what happened."

In the days since Byrd's death, blacks and whites in Jasper have talked frankly about the killing and racial topics previously not discussed. "One man said he had a granddaughter who was half black," says Walter Diggles, the black executive director of the Deep East Texas Council of Governments. "He had had a hard time with that, but now he is accepting her." The sense of unity was difficult at first. At a city council meeting in August, Nancy Nicholson, a member who is white, recalls, "You wouldn't have believed how bad it was. The blacks were so angry, and the whites didn't know what to do. But we've come a long way since then." "It's changed people," says Wade. "There is still subtle racism here. When a white person and a black person enter a store at the same time, usually the white person is served first. That sort of stuff goes on." But, she says, "Jasper is going to be much better because of what happened."

In fact, there is hearteningly widespread dismay over a white boy suspended from school five times in the past month for wearing a buckle with a symbol of the Confederate battle flag. Says Herman Wright, who is black and a former head of the school board: "I have never seen anything like this outright display by a student with deep, deep convictions about race."

In the South, wrote Faulkner, the past isn't dead; it's not even past. That must have seemed all too true when Byrd was buried last June--on the black side of the Jasper City Cemetery, still segregated in 1998. But the truth is that Jasper has progressed a great deal since pre-civil rights days, and Byrd's killing has moved things along even further. Shortly before jury selection, 75 blacks and whites met at the cemetery to cut down the wrought-iron fence that separated the two races even in death. "Give us the power and the strength through this rotten and broken fence to repair the fences in our own lives," prayed the Rev. Ron Foshage of St. Michael's Catholic Church.

That small blow for equality could provide a final bit of redemption. If King is executed and returned to Jasper, he could spend eternity, alongside Byrd, in a place that his violent act helped make a little more free. As Walter Diggles noted last week, "It's almost like the Lord was saying we needed to let people see the evil that is out there in the country." And, he added sadly but proudly, "he wanted it to happen in a place that could handle it."

--Reported by S.C. Gwynne/Jasper and Timothy Roche/Tampa

With reporting by S.C. Gwynne/Jasper and Timothy Roche/Tampa