Anatomy of Injustice Page 13

  BOOK TWO

  Innocence Is Not Enough

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Diana

  ON A CLEAR MONDAY morning at the end of February 1995, Diana Holt walked into the Greenwood County Courthouse and took a seat at the heavy wood counsel table in the spacious, high-ceilinged courtroom. Though thirty-six years old, she had been a lawyer for less than a hundred days and was working at the South Carolina Death Penalty Resource Center. She was in court representing Edward Elmore, in the same courtroom where he was first sentenced to death in 1982. Her goal was to get him a new trial. To succeed, Holt had to convince the judge that thirty-six men and women—three juries at three trials—had gotten it wrong. She knew what it was to tilt against improbable odds.

  Diana Lynn Holt, née Nerren, was born in El Paso’s Providence Memorial Hospital on June 10, 1958, with blue eyes, a fair complexion, and blondish-red hair, her mother recorded in her baby book. She got her surname from Robert Forrest Nerren Jr. He and Diana’s mother, Carroll Jackson, had married while he was home on a forty-eight-hour leave from the air force, thanks to a judge willing to overlook that they were both under the legal age for marriage. They had grown up in the same neighborhood, but she wasn’t marrying her high school sweetheart. It was a marriage of convenience. Jackson was sixteen and pregnant. She needed respectability. He needed a cover. His first consensual physical relationship had been with the chaplain at Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, just outside Cheyenne, Wyoming. In Guam, where he was posted after his leave and marriage, he was a communications specialist with a top-secret clearance. There he had an affair with a male lieutenant colonel. They were caught, and both were dismissed from the service with a dishonorable discharge. (Many years later, Nerren’s friends in San Antonio, feeling that an injustice had been done, helped him get it changed to a general discharge, which is just below an honorable discharge.)

  Back in Houston, Nerren and Carroll both knew their marriage was hopeless. They soon divorced. Carroll was not ready to be a mother, let alone a single mom, and sent Diana to live with her grandmother, Jimmie Quentella Griffin, for lengthy spells. She lived in a small three-bedroom house in Waco, Texas, and Diana remembered the backyard as being a “symphony of colored flowers.” Her grandmother had only a ninth-grade education. Her first husband was killed in an auto accident while she was pregnant with Diana’s mother, and another daughter was run over by a neighbor in his driveway when she was two. Jimmie worked in a Laundromat and was poor, though it seemed to Diana that she was always helping people who had less. In one of the most racist states in the nation, at a time when schools, drinking fountains, restaurants, and just about every other place was segregated, her grandmother was color-blind. She instilled in Diana the values that would define her, including the strength to overcome adversity, not indulge in self-pity, and never give in.

  Diana’s mother was attractive and had no trouble meeting men. She didn’t have great judgment, however. While working as a receptionist at the tony Rice Hotel, she met Wally Bell, or that was the name he used. She was twenty; he was twice that. His real name was Walter Dwinell Belshaw. Beefy and bespectacled, with thick, brushed-back silver hair, he had a checkered past (and a sordid future ahead of him). He had done a spell in federal prison for fraud. They got married on the morning of December 24, 1965, before a justice of the peace. Diana wore a pretty pink dress. Afterward everyone went to breakfast. It was a rare happy moment for the seven-year-old.

  Belshaw did a little bit of everything—sold earth-moving equipment, played piano in bars, had bit roles in commercials, wrote book reviews, played Santa Claus at Christmas (the memory of him holding children on his lap spooked Diana when she thought about it years later). As time went on, Diana came to see him as simply a “slob,” a con man. Life seemed to swing between Neiman Marcus and Goodwill, mostly the latter.

  Every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening, Diana went to Southmont Methodist Church. She was in the Girl Scouts. A photo taken when she was eight shows her with bangs, shoulder-length hair, sparkling eyes, and a smile.

  The picture of cherubic innocence concealed a fetid reality. Diana remembers the first time her stepfather told her, “If you put your mouth on this, you can get some milk.” She was three or four, as best she can recall. That went on for several years, sporadically, usually in his room, which was plastered with Playboy centerfolds. When Carroll and Wally had a daughter, he came up with the girl’s name—Stacey Darling Millicent Quentella Belshaw. If she was ever pulled over by the cops, he said, and was asked her name, she could reply, “Why, Stacey Darling. What’s yours?”

  Diana found escape, solace, and some peace in a mimosa tree in the backyard of their ranch-style house at 5650 Oakham. She would climb it and sit in it for hours.

  At school, Diana didn’t distinguish herself. In the third grade at Windsor Village Elementary, she got three Cs, in arithmetic, language, and handwriting, and two Bs, in reading and spelling. Still, her teacher that year, Julie Hodges, called Diana’s mother to tell her that Diana was quite smart, far more so than she was showing in class.

  Sixth grade was memorable for Diana. She was chosen to read to pupils in the lower grades, an honor she still treasured when her own children were adults. “It might not sound like much, but it was a big deal,” she remembered. For her American history class she wrote a report about Thomas Jefferson; it seemed to her that his accomplishments sprang from his being a lawyer. There weren’t a lot of women lawyers at the time, not even many women law students, but it never occurred to Diana that her gender might be a bar. Her stepfather, however, laughed at the notion and told her she was worthless, that she would never amount to anything. How do you ever find your way home from school, you’re so stupid? he’d say to her. Wally’s derision aside, her aspiration did seem rather implausible; her highest mark her first year at Dowling Junior High School was a C in English. She got Ds in math, world history, and homemaking. Academic achievement did not mark Diana, but her tongue did—“Miss Sassy,” her friends called her.

  As a high school junior, she enrolled at Houston Technical Institute, where she got Cs in English and biology and flunked math but excelled in photography. She was the school Female Photographer of the Year, and one of her teachers wrote that she had the potential to become “an excellent professional photographer.” She wouldn’t, but the talent would give her a lifeline.

  Her academic performance suffered because she was high on drugs much of the time. She took Quaaludes and occasionally smoked marijuana—supplied by her stepfather, who also started her on a cigarette addiction that she wouldn’t be able to kick until she was in her thirties. Belshaw also taught her to drive. On back roads, he would put his left arm over her shoulders and fondle her. I’m just preparing you for what boys will do to you, he would say. He took her to swanky hotels in Houston, the Rice and the Warwick, where he would point out the rich men and say they could really take care of her, that she could have a lot of money. “Use that gold mine you’re sitting on,” he would say.

  Belshaw thought she should become a model. One day, he took her and her best friend, Kim Pinson, to the house of his friend Luke Leonard, who was a photographer. He would put together a portfolio of the young teenagers, Wally explained. Belshaw and Leonard gave the girls drugs. Soon their clothes came off. Diana felt horrible. Leonard kept shooting.

  Kim had long, dark hair, brown eyes, and a wary look. The four of them often went to a Christian-run club, the Seamans Center, which had pool tables, a swimming pool, and a running track. After one night of wholesome fun there, Leonard, who was in his fifties, took advantage of Kim, who was fourteen; another night, “Kim and my old man made out,” Diana recorded in her diary.

  (Kim died, at the age of forty-eight, “all alone and scared, after years of brutality and chaos,” Diana wrote in a deeply moving tribute on the Classmates site for Dowling Junior High School. “We tried to shield each other from abuse but were unsuccessful. Because of her and others, I eventually m
ade it to safety. Kim did not.… I love you dearly, my friend. Yours was the heart of gold others searched for but couldn’t reach. Rest peacefully.”)

  Diana and Kim ran away, hitchhiking to Galveston, some fifty miles from Houston. They met some boys on the beach—“beach rats,” Diana called them. More drugs and unpleasant sex followed. After a few days, a couple of police officers who suspected they were runaways stopped and questioned them. Diana was relieved in a way, for she could now tell someone what had been happening at home. The police returned her to Houston and told her mother she should not take seriously what her daughter was saying, that it was typical for runaway teenage girls to say things like that. Her mother agreed with the police, which added to Diana’s resentment. She was convinced her mother knew what Belshaw was doing to her, or if she didn’t, was willfully ignorant.

  Eventually, after falling in love with Diana’s Girl Scout leader (whose dealings with young girls were no better than Belshaw’s), Carroll decided she wanted a divorce. Belshaw fought to gain custody of Stacey. The custody hearing was held in a courthouse in downtown Houston, on an upper floor, providing a view of the city skyline. Under questioning by her mother’s lawyer, Diana recounted in detail the sexual abuse she had endured from Belshaw. Cross-examination was brutal. She was accused of making it all up. She was wild, loose, wasn’t she? The lawyer pulled out a photograph from his briefcase. It was of Diana naked. It was one of those taken by Luke Leonard. The lawyer took one photograph after another from the table and showed them to Diana. She went numb.

  The court decided that Carroll was as unfit to be a mother as Wally was to be a father, and three-year-old Stacey was put in the care of the Harris County Family Services Department. Diana was left with her mother, for reasons she didn’t know, but perhaps because she was nearly seventeen and the authorities didn’t think she’d be as vulnerable as her little sister. Carroll blamed her loss of Stacey on Diana because of what she had said at the hearing about her stepfather’s conduct.

  A few weeks later, Diana informed her mother that she was going to the school prom with Irving Washington. He was black. They weren’t dating, and he wasn’t her boyfriend; they were just good buddies. If she didn’t go with him, he’d have no one to go with, Diana told her mother.

  Carroll begged Diana not to go with him. She felt she would never get Stacey back if her daughter was dating a black man. It was no use. Diana was Diana—independent, resolute. Words led to blows. Carroll slapped her several times, leaving bruises on her cheeks and a black eye; Diana popped her on the nose, which turned black-and-blue. Diana went to the prom with Irving. A month later, she ran away to New Orleans with some friends she had met at a Houston club.

  IT WAS TWO YEARS before she made it back home. She quickly hooked up with a long-haired former high school sweetheart, Mark Bowers, and they were married. “He was sweet but fucked-up,” she says. “We were both really fucked-up.” His mother, who worked in a grocery store, helped Diana get a job with Decker Meat Company, a subsidiary of Armour & Co. She started as a receptionist, but the owner recognized her ability and she was promoted to sales. In a company-supplied powder-blue Malibu, she traveled the region southeast of Houston, calling on grocery stores and supermarkets, peddling mostly pork products and arranging displays.

  One of her customers was Menotti’s Meat Market in Dickinson, a small town midway between Houston and Galveston. Now divorced from Bowers, she began dating the owner, Eddie Long, grew careless about her work, and was fired. She got pregnant and in January 1981 gave birth to her first child, a son whom she named Jeffrey Alexander. She was unemployed and on food stamps. She and Long married, had a second son, Justin, and moved to San Marcos. Long owned several quarter horses, and Diana spent much time in the barn, grooming and feeding them. There is a picture of Diana, in a down jacket, her blond hair wildly curly, Janis Joplin–style, with Mark Me First, a quarter horse, after it won a three-hundred-yard race at Manor Downs, Texas’s oldest pari-mutuel horse-racing track, on a cold, wet, and windy Sunday, February 7, 1982. (At the same time, far away, Edward Lee Elmore sat in jail awaiting his trial.) Diana, always with an excess of energy and drive, now opened a tanning salon in the San Marcos shopping center. She was proud. “Only two tables—but it was mine,” she said later. She called it Totally Tanned.

  Like her mother, Diana didn’t have great judgment when it came to men. She was becoming more liberal but was attracted to redneck conservatives. Long was an angry Vietnam vet. The third time he hit her, she moved out, saying she was going to get a divorce. A few days later, she went by the house to pick up her remaining possessions. Never one who could hold her tongue, she taunted Long: “Oh, by the way, asshole, I got a lawyer.” He jumped out of a chair, slammed her against the wall, pulled her hair, kicked and punched her. “Fuck you,” she said, “I’m not afraid of you.” He grabbed a Titan .25-caliber automatic pistol—with three rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber—jammed it in her stomach, and pulled the trigger. She heard a click. But no bullet fired. She ran out of the house, jumped into her car, and roared through the broad streets of San Marcos to her tanning studio. She ran down the hallway and into her office, picked up the phone, and called the police. Long was right behind her. “As soon as I get out, cuz they can’t hold me forever, I will kill your ugly ass,” he shouted at her. A few minutes later, the police arrived. “He has a gun!” she screamed, crying and shaking. The police officers drew their weapons and ordered Long to put his hands on his head. They handcuffed him and took him away. Diana left in a separate car. At the station, a police officer showed her the bullet that he had taken from Long’s gun. He pointed to a small indentation where the firing pin had struck it. The gun had jammed.

  Long was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The case dragged on for nearly a year, with Diana unaware of what, if anything, the district attorney was doing until she received a subpoena to appear in court. She arrived early, demure in a loose-fitting lavender skirt, and waited for the case to be called. She waited and waited. At the end of the day, the case still had not been called, and she asked the clerk what was going on. The charges were dismissed, the clerk said; it was just your word against his.

  It was a turning point. “I really felt fucked over,” she recalled. That sixth-grade dream had never died, and she began to think seriously about becoming a lawyer. Her grandmother encouraged her. She sold Totally Tanned and moved to Waco to live with her grandmother again. She started at McLennan Community College, then transferred to North Harris Community College. After four semesters of straight As, she enrolled at Southwest Texas State University, LBJ’s alma mater (since renamed Texas State University–San Marcos). Again she got all As—in algebra, world history, biology, zoology, Spanish, even Golf I. She got pregnant and married the baby’s father, Gordon Holt, who worked for a wholesale electrical supply company; they had met through friends. While raising three small boys, she was on the dean’s list every semester and graduated summa cum laude, with a major in English and a minor in political science.

  She sent off her law school applications, including to Harvard. Hell, why not go for it? she thought. She wasn’t surprised when she didn’t get in. Given her past, she was amazed when the University of Texas admitted her. In response to the question, Why do you want to practice law? she had written: “I want to practice law because I want to help other people—people who have not been afforded much help in their lives.” Holt entered law school thinking she would eventually work in the field of juvenile justice.

  Then she encountered Jordan Steiker. He taught property, which is formulaic, all metes and bounds, primogeniture, how to pass on your wealth. Somehow, he managed to work in his passionate opposition to the death penalty. Before coming to Texas, he had clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom capital punishment was “morally unacceptable,” as Marshall wrote in Furman. During the first week of class, Steiker invited his students to join him at a popular beer and burger joint in Austin. He
talked about the death penalty. He told them how Justice Marshall instructed his law clerks that whenever an application for a stay of execution came into the court, he was to be notified immediately. Once, Steiker called Justice Marshall around midnight to tell him a stay request had come in. “How are you going to vote?” Steiker asked respectfully. “I can’t believe you called me,” Justice Marshall boomed back. “You know how I’m going to vote.”

  The first death penalty case Holt remembers following was that of Charles Brooks, in 1982. It was only the sixth in the country and the first in Texas since the Supreme Court had reinstated the death penalty, and so was major news. Brooks, from a well-off Fort Worth family, and an accomplice, Woody Loudres, had been sentenced to die for the kidnapping and murder of a twenty-six-year-old auto mechanic, whom they bound and gagged and shot once in the head. They had been tried separately. Loudres’s conviction was overturned on appeal, and in a subsequent plea bargain he was sentenced to forty years in prison. Brooks’s lawyers then sought to have his death sentence set aside: it did not seem right that Loudres should live and Brooks be executed when they were guilty of the same murder. Besides, only one shot had been fired, and it was not clear who had pulled the trigger. The Supreme Court turned down his appeal, 6–3.

  When Brooks was strapped to a gurney and wheeled into the death chamber at the state prison in Huntsville, Texas, on December 7, 1982, he became the first person to be executed by lethal injection. This so-called humane way of death touched off a fierce debate. Opponents of capital punishment feared that juries might find it easier to impose “humane” execution. Some death penalty advocates were against it as well. “It’s too lenient,” said a young man who had joined a gathering outside the Huntsville death chamber for Brooks’s execution. “They’ve got to go painfully.”