A NICKEL'S WORTH OF JUICE
GAILLARD, FRYE
A Nickers VNforth ofJuice BY FRYE GAILLARD Unless something changes, they're going to kill Bill Grose-close before very much longer. It'll go something like this: Some people he barely knows will...
...He's about 6-feet-2 and weighs 260 pounds...
...God himself declares them not guilty...
...At first, it ate at me—especially with the situation as crazy as it is...
...Who will accuse God's chosen people...
...Frye Gaillard, an editorial writer and columnist for the Charlotte Observer, wrote "Preacher to the Damned" in the December 1982 issue of The Progressive...
...He is thirty-four years old, though he looks much younger...
...The hatred is there, it's a constant...
...I sat back there all day a while back and played chess with Houston—that's Richard Houston in the cell next to mine...
...He is not an extraordinary person...
...I put the kid to bed and cleaned up the breakfast dishes," he says...
...They're building some crap, and he's wanting me to send him $50 for one memorial brick, and for $500 he'll put gold on it or something...
...They will know that he was arrested in 1977 after his wife was discovered in the trunk of a car...
...Always, always, you look for humor...
...There's a difference, I've discovered, between wants and needs...
...Groseclose is fatalistic...
...We've got one back there who can't read and write...
...So he cut himself out a cross, and for the next little while, he worked at it with a burned match, rubbing the carbon on the cross until the whole thing was black...
...For I am certain that nothing can ever separate us from his love...
...But you do look for the way to laugh, and often enough we find it...
...For a time, Rickman and Groseclose were compelled to share a cell...
...Then they'll push a switch, which will send maybe 2,500 volts of electricity through his body...
...No, in these things we have complete victory through he who loved us...
...It was like a straight right to the face," says Groseclose...
...He has weird ways of expressing himself...
...The prosecution case is based largely on the testimony of Mount, who, in return for his account of the crime, plea-bargained a sentence of ten years in prison...
...Everybody just says no to breakfast...
...Can trouble do it, or hardship or persecution or hunger or poverty or danger of death...
...I've been behind bars five years...
...We don't want any trouble back here on the row...
...So you're standing there in front of the John, and you've already started, and you lean against the wall, and zap, you're sliding all over the place, and the stream's going crazy, and you're laughing like a madman, and then you say to yourself, "Man, how weird can things get...
...I don't have one best friend...
...Harmon Wray will consider them, and Abel Adams, but they will not be able to convince the people in authority...
...If he doesn't, they'll repeat the dosage as many times as it takes...
...If that doesn't work, you're quiet for a half hour, then you try another subject...
...But the thing you notice most, and the thing that stays with you, is the lopsided grin...
...He became increasingly morose as the time drew near, more cynical and self-pitying, and it had an effect on the morale of the row...
...After his parents divorced, his mother, a round-faced woman with a receding chin like her son's, took a job as a payroll clerk at a gypsum mine...
...He was sentenced to death...
...Christianity is of God...
...In my case, it has strengthened my faith...
...He wears wire-rimmed glasses and his hair and beard are scraggly...
...We been next-door neighbors for three years...
...We're teachin' him...
...neither death nor life, neither angels nor other heavenly rulers or powers, neither the present nor the future, neither world above nor the world below—there is nothing in all creation that will ever be able to separate us from the love of God which is ours through Christ Jesus our Lord...
...Britt also confessed and was sentenced to life...
...I stopped and said, "My God, human beings could not have done this to other human beings...
...He studied the Bible and was ordained as a minister after his conviction...
...It'll be a while before I do that again...
...I was there in the Navy, and the things that happened, man...
...But in or out, it's God's will that matters...
...Groseclose says he and Taylor got along well—"I learned from him...
...Then it freezes on the wall in this thin layer of ice that you can't really see...
...He might not die right away...
...Everybody is pretty close...
...It's hard sometimes, but everybody tries to keep each other up...
...We have a good sense of community...
...Jerry Falwell is our pet...
...Six days later, on July 4, they found Deborah's body in the trunk of the Plymouth—mutilated and decomposing where the car had been abandoned...
...Rickman, a South Carolinian whose failed ambition was to join a motorcycle gang, admitted he and Britt kidnapped Deborah Groseclose, but said she was still alive when they left her...
...He hopes for the best from the appeals process, now half completed...
...Course he says the same thing about me, but one time he put a TV set through the bars of his cell with one blow—plastic and tubes and crap all over the place...
...You have to get rid of the superfluous, and you have to keep control of your mind...
...If you are truly going to let the Lord lead you, if it's his will that I burn in that chair, I will...
...Bill's style really does have an effect on people," says Jeff Blum, a staff member with the anti-capital punishment Southern Prison Ministry...
...If someone is down and he likes something on TV, someone will say something about that show...
...That's some pretty heavy stuff, and I think about it sometimes, and then I just listen...
...So the next day, I painted a watermelon and stuck it on his door and burned it...
...Who, then, will condemn them...
...Am I going to scream or cry the rest of my life...
...This whole thing has endowed me with a lot of patience," he says...
...It just didn't hit me what was going on...
...Well, I couldn't let it drop at that point...
...I called the hospitals, her parents, even the jail...
...Then I saw five Vietnamese regulars running up a hill behind the hut...
...I have not been confronted and bothered with the pressures of the outside world— with prices going up, or how am I going to make more money...
...The next morning, Groseclose took his infant son for a routine trip to the doctor and then to the Navy office so they could pick up a paycheck...
...We've got all we can use...
...She lost it when the mine caved in, and after that, she moved around in search of other work...
...Sometimes you don't know if you want it to pass, or you don't want it to pass...
...It'll go something like this: Some people he barely knows will lead him from his cell at the Tennessee State Prison...
...He's serious about his faith...
...I said, 'What do you mean, is she coming in?' They said she wasn't there, and my natural assumption was that the car broke down...
...Even after the funeral, it was just a void, empty, like now what...
...But it is not just creation alone which groans...
...Death is just a doorway9 He was born in 1948 near Salt Lick, Virginia, growing up in a two-story house with two chimneys and a covered porch on two sides...
...he's very ordinary...
...A lot of guys have said, "If I was on the streets, more likely than not, I'd be just like 'em...
...But then you say, "What am I going to do about it...
...But he believes that if it fails, Groseclose will die...
...He survived and came home, and after a failed marriage that produced two children— freckle-faced boys now ten and eight—he moved on to Memphis...
...They'll strap him to a tall, wooden chair and attach some electrodes to his thighs...
...We got a leak back there, and water comes pouring into the cell behind the commode...
...He's well-educated, very smart, a pretty handsome dude...
...It's a crazy situation," says Harmon Wray, a Nashville minister who has visited Groseclose regularly over the past five years...
...it stinks...
...They will try to tell the governor, who will not want to listen, about their conversations with Groseclose over five years...
...he plays cards—plays cards and gambles...
...But in here, it's a peculiar situation...
...It was one good, full, hard day of chess...
...It's who are you hanging out with this week...
...We had no joys or difficulties that other married couples don't experience...
...He keeps pretty much to himself...
...He took fifth in the world billiard championships one time, but he hardly ever discusses playing pool...
...There's some that say, "No, I don't...
...You answer that a million times, and then you turn around and disregard the answer and say, Why...
...I've tried to put across the idea of Christianity versus religion, and I think the general feeling back there is that religion is of man...
...He's OK...
...Ol' Paul could write: "I consider that what we suffer at this present time cannot be compared at all with the glory that is going to be revealed to us...
...They will know these things, and they will feel that they are doing what they should—for theirs will be an awesome duty...
...They will know that she was stabbed and raped and beaten, and they may also know that she did not die from those things...
...When Groseclose was twelve, she remarried, and the family wound up in Kingsport, Tennessee...
...But none of them were that bad...
...the numbers 83408 are stitched on the back...
...But when I think about all the things I've learned and thought about, all I've grown, all the listening I've done, I just can't imagine wasting all that for five cents of electricity...
...The dinner today was...
...I was driving a supply truck, and I came to a hut where this Vietnamese peasant had been castrated and tied to a tree...
...But it hangs pretty heavy sometimes...
...But they will certainly fail, for their words will have the soft and simple ring of sentimentality—and others in their grief will cry out for revenge, and time will pass slowly until his waiting will end...
...he's balding and got this mustache...
...I was off that day...
...This is what he says: Man, it's cold in here—just about back up to the shivering point...
...He has his ego and his foibles...
...Ask him a question or two, and his thoughts flow freely, the feelings tumbling out with punctuations of laughter, moving inexorably from the light to the heavy...
...How many hungry kids could you feed for that...
...Like any marriage," says Groseclose, "this one had its problems...
...he learned from me"—and adolescence passed with only normal scrapes and mischief...
...It's just something everybody seems to do...
...I was sitting in the family room, and the phone rang...
...I called the police...
...One time when I was over there, I came upon this torture scene...
...One time—I forget what we was mad about—I cut out this cross out of an envelope, you know, then I licked it and stuck it to his door and set it on fire...
...Prosecutors for the State of Tennessee tell the story differently...
...But they will not dwell on that point, for they are Christian ministers, and their interest is in redemption...
...The people who do this will have very good reasons...
...Got a bad heart...
...I don't mean by that there aren't any believers...
...But there are also things that they will not consider...
...He'll say, "I am muscular...
...You'll do anything to fill it up...
...Either Bill Groseclose is guilty of a monstrous act of violence, a brutal aberration from his life before and after, or he is innocent The problem is time...
...And a nose—man, Jimmy Durante would have to hide...
...At seventeen, Groseclose joined the Navy and spent four years in Vietnam...
...Even the guards became gloomy, and when the word finally arrived that Groseclose had gotten a stay, one of them—a burly black veteran of the prison force—hurried in with the news...
...Jeff's a soap-opera freak...
...So was their green Plymouth Fury, a 1973 model...
...you don't have to look for the hatred...
...The guys would see these ministers on TV with all their fallacies...
...This whole thing has endowed me with a lot of patience/ he says...
...Some of what we find to laugh about is pretty weird...
...we who have the Spirit as the first of God's gifts also groan within us for God to make us his sons and set our whole being free...
...I got more serious about religion in Vietnam...
...I pulled my pistol and emptied it in their direction...
...So you have to learn to live with it...
...Then he stuck it on my door...
...In January 1982, Groseclose came within four days of his execution date...
...Like sometimes I think about Vietnam...
...Mostly, though, we just sit and watch the world go by...
...They say Groseclose, working through a young intermediary named Barton Wayne Mount, hired two men to kill his wife—paying Phillip Britt and Ronald Rickman $100 apiece so he could collect on a $32,000 insurance policy...
...If God is for us, who can be against us...
...They had cut his wife's abdomen open and pulled out a fetus and used it to beat her children to death...
...I said, "Did I, or didn't I?" Over the years, I had time to think...
...But I've been fortunate not to lose both at the same time...
...This guy has a beak...
...I think that and his sense of humor have kept him together...
...Jeff is a nonviolent, violent person...
...Nobody had seen or heard from her...
...They will know some of the details of Groseclose's history...
...It's remarkable, really, that he has managed to stay sane...
...He reads the letter, then somebody else will read it, and they'll say, "OK, what did it say...
...But any time you can give somebody an excuse to laugh, you do it...
...Opinions back there are straight from the heart and cold as ice...
...We call him Swamp Monster...
...He worked as a Navy recruiter, and on April 4, 1975, two years after his separation and divorce, he remarried...
...I think I know that now...
...About everybody back there is antireli-gious...
...Jeff Dix down there, he placed third in the cockroach race...
...Paul...
...I asked myself, "Do I have so little control over my emotions I would shoot at somebody in a moment like that...
...They are the ones that keep the conversation alive...
...I have lost control a time or two...
...What is going to come of it...
...But they fought, and the arrangement was altered...
...I saw three go down...
...We don't start stirring till about 10 or 11—usually about the noon meal...
...We also talk about it a lot on the row...
...There for about two or three minutes, it just wasn't real...
...They did fight, however, and on the night of June 28,1977, they had quite a row...
...Ole Richard, he's short and fat...
...Groseclose enters the room with a bounce to his step, clad in jeans, a T-shirt, and a faded denim jacket...
...If that fails, you straight out ask, "Hey, man, what's happenin...
...If he can't, we go over it with him...
...Today, Groseclose is three cells away, living with one of two realities: Either he is guilty of a monstrous act of violence, a brutal aberration from his life before and after, or he is innocent—facing death because of the murder of a woman he once loved, living in proximity to a man who may have killed her...
...I mean the thing you ask yourself about Vietnam is, Why...
...He's a leader, pretty up most of the time, someone who is in control of his situation...
...well, how can I say it...
...Grose-close's flesh, particularly around his legs, will begin to burn...
...But he don't like to think of himself as fat...
...Iwas arrested July 11,1977...
...There was a good-climbing sugar maple near the picket fence out front, and he would climb to the point where the branches became frail, and stare off at the colors on the mountain behind his house...
...I can devote more time to being still and listening...
...Or look at Oral Roberts with his multi-million-dollar prayer tower...
...So we do what we can to help each other out, to keep each other's spirits boosted...
...Only one guy took anything...
...So they will talk instead about Groseclose's life: his correspondence studies at a small Bible college, his ordination as a Church of God minister only a short time after his conviction for murder...
...Groseclose is fatalistic...
...it's all right...
...He spits it back out...
...Imade it here in April 1978—April Fool's Day...
...In fact, I don't think there are any nonbelievers...
...I just kept on with what I was doin', trying to be nonchalant, don't you know...
...Of my mind, yes, and of my emotions...
...Wray says he is uncertain about Grose-close's future...
...I've fed a lot of dogs a lot of things...
...His new wife, Deborah, was 5-feet-2, blond, and rather pretty...
...they were giggling...
...Boyhood had its idyllic moments, but there were also hard times...
...Hey, Groseclose," he said, "we're glad you're gonna stick around...
...She cooked—probably over a period of several days—beneath the July sun in the river town of Memphis...
...It was her office asking if she was coming in...
...Already, they'll have shaved his head to keep his hair from catching fire...
...Whenever he gets a letter, we go over it with him...
...Groseclose says he wasn't worried, since Deborah, a medical receptionist, was due at work that morning...
...They will believe Bill Groseclose is innocent—that he is not vicious and cruel, and that he could never have done the things that the state says he did...
...But in his circumstances, that's not an easy thing to be...
...Oh, we love him...
...Her new husband, Walter Taylor, was short and heavy-set—a storeroom worker at an Eastman Kodak plant, who learned from his stepson how to write his name...
...Down the row there's Richard Austin...
...This article is reprinted with permission from "Race, Rock & Religion: Profiles from a Southern Journalist, "published by the East Woods Press, 429 East Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28203...
...But when the believers are having their conversations, there's always close attentiveness among the nonbelievers...
...Romans 8:18 is my favorite, but you can keep going from there...
...If I get out some day, there's a lot I'm looking forward to...
...His fists will clench involuntarily, and his hands will probably blacken...
...Still, you think about things...
...Because of the horror of the crime, and because members of Deborah Grose-close's family are calling in their grief for rapid executions, Wray says no governor of Tennessee would be inclined to commute the sentence...
...But if recent precedents hold true, several things are likely...
...They will use such words as kindness, faith, and humor, and they will speak of his desperate consolation in the writings of St...
...Death is so imminent, you can't really help it...
...They stuck his penis in his mouth and sutured it shut...
...Houston is black...
...Death is just a doorway...
...For we know that up to the present time all of creation groans with pain, like the pain of childbirth...
...Then several hours passed, and she didn't call, didn't show up...
...He plays the role of mediator...
...When he returned, his wife was gone...
...He'll take bets on anything—football, baseball, basketball, how many bullets they'll shoot on Bonanza...
...I read the Bible a lot—underline verses and think about their meaning...
...Who, then, can separate us from the love of Christ...
...Nobody knows how bad it will hurt, since nobody has ever reported back after the experience...
...But to err is human...
Vol. 47 • February 1983 • No. 2
