Peckerwood Hill

More than 3,000 dead, indigent inmates lie in the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery, better known as Peckerwood Hill Peckerwood Hill Texas prison cemetery is a death-penalty artifact awaiting next change By RON FRANSCELL grocery sack flutters in the highest Beaumont Enterprise, 4/1/2008 branches of a yellow pine, a ghost guard keeping watch over nearly 3,000 dead, HUNTSVILLE, Texas — A shroud indigent criminals Texas has buried here of low, ashen mist swathes Peckerwood for the past 160 years. Hill on a corpse-cold day in Texas. The history of the American death No matter. Rev. Carroll Pickett penalty is written across the handmade knows the spot he seeks. The ground is concrete headstones on Peckerwood Hill, spongy with night rain, sunken in some Texas’ biggest and oldest prison places where cheap pine-box coffins cemetery. It is as much an artifact of have rotted and collapsed, so he walks capital punishment as “Old Sparky,” the respectfully among the dead. A plastic Texas electric chair, now a Inmate #670 – J.D. Autry, a 29- museum piece. year-old kid who shot a Port More condemned men – Arthur convenience store clerk 180 – are buried here than 29 for a six-pack of beer. Autry’s other states have executed in was only the second execution their entire history. Most share he’d attended. the ignominy of a nameless “They called him Cowboy tombstone marked only with and he was my friend,” the their inmate number, a death white-haired, 78-year-old date and a simple “X” … Pickett says, kneeling to brush executed. dry leaves from a small plaque This spring, the U.S. Supreme Court someone later placed at Autry’s grave. will likely deliver its latest opinion about “His time came and he was strapped in a the constitutionality of lethal injection – little after 11. We were in that room an execution method first used in Texas together, just me and him, nobody else, in 1982. The justices’ ruling could affirm for almost an hour. Then he got a stay or adjust America’s preferred death- just before midnight. He spent all that mechanism, or shake the institution of time strapped down, waiting to die. Then capital punishment to its core for the he didn’t.” second time in the past 40 years. Back on Death Row, the resurrected The dead on Peckerwood Hill are Autry became a hero of mythic past caring. This place smells and feels proportion. He’d gone where nobody different from other graveyards. It’s dark else had ever gone, into the death and sour, as if bad men decay into bad chamber, and lived to tell about it. Five earth. Not all were executed, but all were months later, he walked the last mile criminals doing time. The memories here with Pickett for a second time and didn’t aren’t happy, and few mourners leave come back. flowers, much less celebrate wasted After Autry, Pickett buried 20 more lives. And Peckerwood Hill is little more executed men on Peckerwood Hill than a 22-acre potter’s field, since these (which the now-retired Presbyterian dead prisoners had no money nor family minister prefers to call by its proper willing to claim their corpses. name, Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery, for Rev. Pickett stops. As Texas’ death the assistant warden who personally house chaplain between 1982 and 1997, cleaned up the overgrown boneyard and he escorted 95 men the last eight paces to located hundreds of unmarked graves in their executions. The mildewed cross at the 1960s. But “Peckerwood Hill” – a his muddy feet is stamped, simply and reference to poor Southern trash – is coldly, “3-14-84 X 670.” what prisoners have called it for the past Pickett stood on this spot 24 years 100 years.) ago and conducted a secret funeral for “To walk out here is to know these people had two or three deaths,” Pickett says. “Going to prison is like dying, but when their bodies finally die, they’re here all alone.” Pickett remembers all of them. He can tell you something about each one. He carries a Bible and a log of their deaths. He can tell you what they ate, their last words and how they faced death at the end. As he walks down the line of gray stones, he pauses before the untended trash heap, spiritually and intermittent ones marked with the telltale physically. Nobody cared much. Weeds “X.” and brush engulfed it, hiding graves “Here’s Jay Kelly Pinkerton,” while time and the elements rotted their Pickett says. “I think he was about 17 wooden crosses. When Capt. Joe Byrd when he raped and stabbed a 70-year-old organized the massive cleanup in the nun. In those moments before he died 1960s, he located 922 graves, although [on May 15, 1986], I asked him why. He nobody knows exactly who’s in 312 of told me, ‘I just wanted to know what it them. Many more were lost forever. was like.’” “It’s hard to believe they kept no A boneyard by accident records of who was buried here until Peckerwood Hill was an unused 1974,” Willett said recently. “They were patch of private land when the new burying people here for 120 years before Texas prison in Huntsville mistakenly anybody thought to write it down. I think began using it as a burial ground in 1853. there are about 260 people that we don’t A couple years later, the landowners even know who they are.” deeded it to the State of Texas, reckoning Peckerwood Hill’s most famous a boneyard for scoundrels wasn’t much “resident” busted out long ago. Kiowa use for anything else. chief Satanta, who was imprisoned in No burial records were ever kept, but 1874 for leading insurgent raids on photos of Peckerwood Hill in 1899 show Texas settlers and inspired the character many graves, all marked with wooden Blue Duck in Larry McMurtry’s crosses, according to Jim Willett, the “Lonesome Dove,” committed suicide by former prison warden who now runs the leaping from a prison window and was Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville. buried on Peckerwood Hill in 1878. In When it comes to death and prison, 1963, his grandson claimed his bones Willet is an indisputable expert: In three and reburied them in Fort Sill, Okla., but years as warden between 1998 and 2001, a monument to Satanta remains. he witnessed 89 executions, more than Until 1923, executions were carried any warden in American history. out by county sheriffs in Texas, usually Over its first hundred years, by hanging. Then the State of Texas Peckerwood Hill was little more than an assumed the morbid duty and the electric weren’t resumed for nearly 20 years. So visitors will find no X’d markers from the 1960s and ’70s. At midnight on Dec. 7, 1982, killer Charlie Brooks became the first American to die by lethal injection. That night, America got a new kind of death. And that night, Rev. Carroll Pickett said an earnest prayer and helped Brooks die a good death. A good man, a hard history chair became the official death mechanism. Rev. Pickett has buried hundreds of Texas executed its first inmate by men here. Not just a handful of executed electrocution on Feb. 8, 1924 — killers, but small-time hoods with bad followed quickly by four more within a hearts, gangsters with AIDS, bed-sheet few hours. Today, three of those five and razor-blade suicides, victims of men are buried side-by-side on shanks, cancer and old age. Peckerwood Hill, and Texas has Rev. Pickett looks down at the executed a total of 911 inmates since ground, or perhaps the flawed souls 1923. Some 405 of those were executed concealed there. The heavy air is colder by lethal injection before the U.S. now. Supreme Court decided to reconsider its “Yes, I suppose they were bad,” he constitutionality last month. says, “or at least did bad things. But I Now as then, a grave is hand-dug by knew a man who stuffed a sausage down inmates, sometimes before there’s a dead his son’s throat and killed him. Later, he man to fill it. Funerals always begin at was active in the church and very 8:30 a.m., and there might be two or generous. He changed. Some of them … three in short order. The dead convict is well, sometimes I’ve thought we might buried in his release clothes, a work shirt have been friends in a different situation and khaki pants. He is transported by a at another time.” proper hearse, not a state pickup. Four Pickett pauses at another grave. Here inmates act as pallbearers, then bury the lies Donald Franklin, who viciously casket after the death house chaplain raped and murdered a San Antonio says a few words. Sometimes, mourners nurse. Just before he was executed 13 come, sometimes they don’t. years later, he told Pickett he reckoned Another chapter of death-penalty he’d be reincarnated as a tree in Tyler, history can be seen only by reading Texas. Then he died. between the barely tidy lines of And a little further is the only headstones. In 1964, Texas executions condemned man who never talked to stopped while America wrestled with the Pickett about his crimes, even at the end. humanity of death penalty, and they In 1976, James Demouchette and his brother executed two Houston Pizza Hut with them, and who listened to whatever workers so they could steal a bag of they wanted to say before their last change and a stereo.

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