Texas After Violence Project Interview with Joanna Vaughn

Date: February 19, 2009

Place: Austin, Texas

Equipment: Sony mini-HD DV camcorder Sennheiser external microphone

Recorded on: Sony mini-DV cassettes

Interviewer: Gabriel Solis

Videographer: Lydia Crafts

Also present: Larry Vaughn

Transcription: Kimberly Bacon

Reviewed & proofread: Kimberly Bacon

Proofread & edited: Virginia Raymond

GABRIEL SOLIS: The tapes are an hour long, so if after an hour you feel exhausted, we can—

JOANNA VAUGHN: Don’t have to do any more.

SOLIS: But at an hour, if you would like to continue, we’ll switch tapes.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Okay.

SOLIS: And we can— but you, however long you want.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Okay.

SOLIS: So, you ready?

CRAFTS: I’m ready. I’m recording.

SOLIS: Great. So, what is today’s date?

CRAFTS: Nineteenth, I think.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Yeah, February nineteenth.

SOLIS: Today is February nineteenth, 2009.

JOANNA VAUGHN: And it’s Thursday.

SOLIS: Thursday, and we’re in the home of Joanna and Larry.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Vaughn.

SOLIS: Vaughn. And present in the room, my name is Gabriel Solis, I’m the interviewer and Lydia Crafts is running the camera. Thank you Joanna.

CRAFTS: Yeah, thank you.

SOLIS: For having us, inviting us into your home, and sharing your experience with us. I wanted to just start out, if you can just talk about what kind of work you do here in Austin. How you got into working with the Anti-Death Penalty Committee?

JOANNA VAUGHN: Yeah. I’m a teacher. I’m an elementary school art teacher, and I got involved as a pen pal by somebody, a lawyer named D’Ann Johnson, raising two letters up during announcements after the worship service. Friends Meeting is where I go and she said, “I have these two guys on Death Row. They want pen pals,” and that was about nine years ago, not quite nine years ago.

And I just bit my tongue and sat on my hands and didn’t raise my hand and say me, me, me, me, me, because I figured someone else will do this. So then I don’t know, a week or two how ever long later I asked her, Did you get some pen pals for those two guys?

And she said “No.”

I thought, Well that’s weird. And because it seemed to me that writing letters was not a huge big deal. Anyway, that’s what it seemed to me. So Glenna Balch and I both volunteered at that point, and I volunteered to write to [name of person, prison number that Joanna Vaughn writes to gives name and prison number of person Glenna Balch writes to. Actual names and numbers withheld from transcript for the present]. She and I just wrote for a while, and then she became designated as a spiritual advisor by the Friends Meeting - I did not.

And the two of us joined Jude Filler in making this trip which Jude had been making for years previous out to Livingston to visit people, and I’m not sure when I first went out to visit; it might have been eight years ago.

[My pen pal, name withheld for present] wrote and said he’d like to put me on his visitors list, and I said, Yes.

I want to back up and say that when I was deciding to write or not to write, to be a pen pal or not be a pen pal I brought it up with Larry and he said, “Oh I don’t know about this, this is like a really bad idea, because they’re going to kill him and it’s going to be really hard on you.”

And being stubborn, I sort of decided well I’m going to do it, so there. My thinking at the time was something like “You know, they’re on death row they’re never going to get out, so I don’t need to worry about them coming around my door and bothering me.”

Okay, that’s— I was feeling like that was safer than having a relationship with someone who was going to get out. Now I can honestly say that knowing [him], I would like nothing better than to have him sit right here and cook him a meal, and show him around the house in person not just in photos, but anyway.

Since that time, through the Friends Meeting we send cards to all of the people on death row and have done for the last maybe five years. The first two or three years I sent out ten or twenty cards, with how much text can you get on a post card, and I got some answers back. And based on the answers, excuse me, that I got back, I added a couple of people.

So then I had three pen pals [names withheld from transcript for the present – vr, July 2011 ] Both [..] wanted me to turn into a visitor as well as a pen pal and I did.

Visiting two people in one day is like totally max. It’s a four-hour drive from here to there, and then two hours visit and then two hours visit, and then a four hour drive back; it’s a whole lot of sitting.

So then I got a card back from Johnny, and I really was feeling like I don’t need anymore pen pals, right, but I guess there was just something interesting about his letter so I wrote back and he wrote back and we’ve been pen pals for about three years. A little more than three years it was. His number was 999197 and he’s not there anymore as of last Thursday, which was, for what it’s worth Lincoln’s Birthday, two hundredth birthday somehow it seems relevant. But I didn’t actually meet him even though we wrote back and forth, and I think got to know each other pretty well in a lot of ways.

I didn’t actually meet him until the Saturday before he was executed, because I wasn’t on his visitor list he hadn’t— the other guys had asked me, “Would you be on my visitor list, I’d like to put you on my visitor list.”

But he hadn’t asked me. I kind of figured, Well the other guys asked me so that must be the way it’s done, so I didn’t ask him, Do you want me to be on your visitors list? So he figured I didn’t want to be on his visitors list because he figured I must have enough to deal with these other pen friends and visiting. Also he was a little worried that or maybe not worried but just assumed that the other guys had said bad things about him to me and so I didn’t want to be on his visitors list.

So actually Robert Ladd, last time I was there, and I don’t know exactly when it is, but Robert Ladd said, “Well, you know Johnny’s got a date.” We talked about it and he said, “I think you really need to write to him and tell him that you’d like to meet him. Don’t just wait for him.”

So I did and so he put me on both his visitor list and his execution witness list. And so then I got really, really, really stressed out and got sick probably because I was like, Oh my God, you know this— it was pretty huge and intense, and heavy, and I think my body just responded to the internal stress by getting the flu. Anyways, so the day I went to visit him I was getting over the flu and fortunately Delia— Do you know about Delia?

Her brother is on death row. Delia Pérez had already rented a car and she drives really fast and since I wasn’t on the car rental agreement, she drove all the way and all the way back, which was good.

Okay, so I got to meet Johnny Johnson. We had a really good two hour conversation. That’s how much time you get. He had a fabulous laugh; he just threw his head back and laughed and I’ve written down pretty much everything I could remember from that visit. It took me about two hours to type everything I could remember. You’re welcome to have it. So that was Saturday then there was Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then Thursday, and Thursday was the day that he was executed. And why don’t you ask me a question?

SOLIS: Well I was just curious to know, could you describe— and I know you’ve been to death row previously visiting, and I’m curious to know what those first visits were like?

JOANNA VAUGHN: The very first one?

SOLIS: I’m interested in knowing about that, and I’m also interested to know for you to describe visiting Johnny [on] Saturday, not even a week before his execution.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Right. Well, okay the first time I went, I went with Jude and I was really scared. I had never been into— Well I shouldn’t say I’ve never been into a prison before. I’ve never been arrested and the only two times I’d ever been in a prison — once I went into the waiting room because a lady that had gotten let out of prison, they left her purse back at the prison and so she didn’t have any I.D. or any money or anything so I drove her back it was some years ago and waited for her.

The other time I had been in a prison before my first visit to death row was when I was about seven and my father was best friends with the police captain in New York and I think they were trying to “jail-proof” me, so they took me to see the jail and they opened one of these gate kind of doors, and they put me in the cell and closed the gate. I don’t know if they locked it, but then they went off to the office and left. I was like, Ewwww, I don’t like this place. I’m a little kid.

SOLIS: Obviously it worked.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Yeah it really worked because I’ve never been arrested. So anyway, that strategy paid off. So I had never been in except for those two times and I had certainly never been so far in.

Fortunately, Eugene is a very comfortable, sociable person, and so that worked really well. He was able to put me ease, and we could have a two-hour conversation. I mean just the idea of a two hour conversation with somebody you’ve never met is also a little bit weird. But anyway, that was the first time.

SOLIS: What was it like inside? What was your reaction with the corrections officers?

JOANNA VAUGHN: Well, let’s see. That was before— now you get frisked. They didn’t frisk then. This was some time ago. The whole thing has gotten stricter, and stricter, and stricter because of various infractions mostly having to do with smuggling stuff in, I guess. So I remember the first time, there are these giant rolls of barbed wire. The really shiny, really— not just the kind you put on a fence for farming, but it’s like that.

SOLIS: Razors.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Yeah, razor wire. That’s what it’s called. So you go in the front door and then you give your license and you tell who it is you want to visit and what their number is and then they give you a piece of paper and a chain with a number on it, and you don’t have to wear the chain with the number on it, but anyway.

Then you go out the back door of this small beginning place, whatever it’s called, and you’re in this no man’s land between a big chain link fence with a razor wire, and there’s gravel, and then there’s another big chain link fence with razor wire, and there’s the door here and there’s a gate there. And then there’s more razor wire up here and more razor wire up here, and then there’s a guard house down there and a guard house down there. And then there’s just open space and then there’s the big two sides of the prison and then there’s the opening where you go in.

The pathway is flanked by manicured rose bushed and other perennials, and sometimes they have other sort of horticulture things going on. So that’s the scene. You walk along— have you ever been there?

SOLIS: I haven’t.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Okay. You walk along, and I really make it a point now, if there’s any rose in bloom, to stop and smell the roses, partly because Eugene used to— still does sometimes, always end his letters with “Have a good day for me,” ‘cause there are like ten zillion things they can’t do, including stop and smell the roses.

So, I don’t think I stopped and smelled the roses. I think I was just too terrified, just walk straight on the path. You go into a door that is actually a double door and inside there’s a— well I guess it’s on this side when you go in— a big thing of umbrellas, in case anybody needs an umbrella going the other way. And then you’re in this nice shiny, shiny, shiny place. Looks even a little bit pleasant, and there’s a couple of restrooms and a door. I have no idea where that goes to over there, but you go this way and you go down a hall and pass a couple of other hallways and that’s the way to the warden’s office.

Keep on going and then there’s another place where you have to show your identification and they have electronic doors that open— sort of like pocket doors. And you go in, the door closes behind you, and then there’s another electronic door that opens and you go in again and it closes behind you. And then you’re in the first part of the visitation room and you have to go to the second part and you show, again, to this lady, who’s a guard, and she tells you which place you’re going to sit. There is a series of booths and there are two plastic chairs out here and a very uncomfortable metal place to put your arms there, and side panels, two telephones on this side, one on the other side, and I guess it’s glass, not Plexiglas. Whatever it is, it’s very solid. And on the other side, there’s this little booth. I mean let’s see, these are one square-foot tiles, it might be three-feet by four-feet max.

SOLIS: How tall is it?

JOANNA VAUGHN: It’s like a cage; there’s a top. I don’t know exactly how tall it is, but it’s got strong mesh on the top and the sides are solid and the back has a door with mesh and a hole in it through which they can pass a bag of food. And of course it locks. Actually, the guys, they come in like this and they have to bend over and put their hands like that so a guard can stick a key in through that hole after they’ve already locked the guy into the little room, cage, and undo the handcuffs and take them with them.

SOLIS: And I’m kind of curious, what kinds of things do you talk about when you have written letters back and forth, to sit down face-to-face and have a conversation? What kind of things come out that you can’t write in a letter, and maybe there isn’t anything that you can’t write, but what is it like to make the contact with the people you’ve been corresponding with?

JOANNA VAUGHN: My first thought was, well it’s pretty customary to put your hand up, so that you’re saying hello by a hand against a hand with the glass in between, to say hello and to say goodbye that way. I suppose people who are romantically involved must smooch on the glass, but I’m not— it’s just a hand.

One thing that you can’t really do in a letter is hear the sound of somebody’s voice, although you have handwriting and you have these little faces that almost everybody that writes from prison uses little happy faces, little sad faces, all kinds of little emoticons. Then— and even if they’re typing they’ll put these in. So there’s just the human voice, and along with the human voice, there’s also the possibility of singing, which you can’t do in a letter. I mean you can write words, but you can’t sing.

So I haven’t actually done that so much with Robert, but I did a lot with Eugene. I like to sing, he likes for me to sing. Sometimes we actually we both sing the same song, which is actually pretty cool if you’re singing the same song on the telephone. And so when I met Johnny, one of the things that I asked him was, “What are some of your favorite songs that I might know?”

And he said— he started singing. He started singing this one and I didn’t know that one at all. The different groups have different hymnals, right? So I’m expecting that most of these are from the Baptist hymnal and I’m not familiar with it. Something that ended up with “We’ll understand it better by and by.”

Okay, that was one. Then there was another one that I had never heard before. It was “He lives. He lives. You ask me how I know he lives. He lives in my heart.” Okay, a song about Jesus.

And “Amazing Grace,” I knew, so I sang a little bit of it and he was satisfied I knew it.

So then we went on to the next song, which right now I can’t remember at all, whatever it was. Oh, yeah, “Yield Not to Temptation.” So I found “Yield Not to Temptation” in Larry’s mom’s hymnal, and he asked me, “Why do you want to know?”

I said, “Well, barring miracle, you’re going to get executed and I can sing these songs, I can learn these songs and sing these songs and remember you.”

And he said, “You would do that?”

And I said, Sure, that would be something I’d like to do. And so, anyway that was just an example of something that wouldn’t be so easy to do in a letter.

SOLIS: Well—

JOANNA VAUGHN: And actually, Gracia, who was the person who drove with me on Thursday, on the day that he was executed and was there as my support person, really, the whole time, she knew that song “He Lives, He Lives.”

So jumping ahead to after he had been executed and he really, really wanted us to go and make sure he was dead— I’ll tell you more about that in a minute.

So we did, and Gracia, and I and Mrs. Clay and her sister, Aunt Helen, Helen Phillips, and their brother, whose name I don’t know. I want to say Barnett [Burnett], but I don’t think that’s it— really, really nice people. We all went to the funeral home, and made sure he was really dead. How do you make sure somebody is really dead? I mean you touch them. Are they breathing? Do they have a pulse? I didn’t feel for a pulse, but we all— Gracia didn’t touch him, the rest of us all touched him, or touched his body. And Gracia sang, Gracia sang that song because none of the rest of us were up for singing, and she, who had been outside on the street corner with the protestors and then slightly down the street from the protestors, ‘cause the noise was getting on her nerves and she wanted some silence. There weren’t very many protestors that day. Anyway, she knew the song, she knew he liked it, and so she thought it’d be nice to sing it and she did, and it was really nice that she sang it then and there.

SOLIS: That was in the funeral home?

JOANNA VAUGHN: That was in the funeral home. Yep.

SOLIS: If you care to, would you go back and just talk about the Thursday.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Sure.

SOLIS: If you care to talk about—

JOANNA VAUGHN: No, it’s fine.

SOLIS: What it was like going in and being a media witness with the process and what it’s like to walk into the death chamber and to witness someone’s life be taken.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Right, right. One thing he had asked me about a year and a half ago was to please take these two letters that he had written to the Texas Defenders, and I had emailed back and forth with them and had never taken the letters because the person who had been assigned to his case, their visa had run out. They’d gone back to England, et cetera, et cetera. So after I realized here is this guy, he’s got a date to be executed, and I haven’t brought those letters down to the Texas Defenders, I started scrounging around for every letter I could find of his. And I went down there three times and brought everything that I could find that he had ever written to me, including the letters that he thought would be helpful to them.

And I’m saying that because the day before, on Wednesday before I went on Thursday, I did get a call after work from— Okay, her name, the name of the lady at Texas Defenders, anyway, blank, I’ll think of it.

And she said, “I just want to let you know that we filed something on his behalf.”

And I can’t say what court it was because I still get confused about which court is which, and I don’t know which court they filed it with, but it might have even been the Supreme Court. Some court. And so she said, “If there’s a stay, we’ll know by tomorrow morning.”

So I didn’t hear anything so I figured there wasn’t a stay, and she said, “Don’t tell him because it really, really wouldn’t be helpful to him to know that at this point.”

And he had even said, when I met him on the Saturday before, he’d said, “You know, it’s really not useful to me to think about whether— about what if, what if I get a stay.”

He said, “I’ve been here thirteen years. I need to be realistic. I need to be prepared for reality and reality is I’m probably not going to get a stay. I need to be prepared spiritually to die, so.”

So Thursday I left early with Gracia and we got to Huntsville probably at ten, and I thought, okay it’s— I had talked on the phone with Mrs. Clay and she had said she didn’t know Huntsville at all and maybe we could carpool from Livingston ‘cause I was going to go to Livingston and see Johnny one more time with her, I thought. Didn’t work out that way, but I thought, well okay if we’re going to— and I had said, No it’s not going to work to carpool ‘cause I’m not going back to Livingston. She lives east of Livingston. I live here in Austin, so but we could caravan, you could follow us.

So I thought that we were going to have to show Mrs. Clay how to find the different places we had to find: the Hospitality House and the funeral home and stuff.

And so we sort of made the rounds and went to the Hospitality House, okay, here it is. We were looking at the map. Okay, here’s actually the Walls Unit, here’s the funeral home.

Well, it said in the paper that I’d gotten that you should tell the funeral home the day before if you wanted to view the body. Well it was not the day before anymore. It was too late for that, so I thought as long as we’re right outside the funeral home, might as well stop and walk in and see if we can do this evening if we need to, barring the miracle.

And so we went in and this guy at the funeral home was really upset because yes, Mrs. Clay had made all the arrangements to take Johnny’s body with her funeral home to her town to be cremated, to be buried in the plot, her family plot next to her son ‘cause Johnny is her adopted son, was her adopted son. And they both were really happy about this. This was really great. He wouldn’t have to be buried in the place that they put people from death row if they don’t have family to take them some place else.

But the funeral home man said, “Another party, another party wants the body. Another party is claiming that it’s their right.”

I have no idea who the other party was. He wasn’t in a position to say who the other party was, so I gave him my cell phone number, I gave him Mrs. Clay’s cell phone number, and then Gracia and I got a little distracted.

She has a law degree, we’re both members of this thing called AMBIS: Austin Memorial Burial Information Society.

So we got a little distracted. We went to the library, went online, tried to find information, and then decided this is ridiculous. What we really need to be doing is going to Livingston and this is Mrs. Clay’s problem. If she has to fight for the right to take Johnny’s body, she’s going to have to fight for the right to take Johnny’s body, but it’s not our fight. So we got back in the car and went to Livingston, but by the time we got to Livingston, it was about eleven, and I went in and I thought that I could go in and sit at one of these circular tables they have there and take turns at the little cubicle with the two telephones.

That’s how they used to do it. They don’t do it that way anymore. Now they’ll only allow two visitors in, even when a person’s going to be killed that very day, okay. It used to be that the whole family would be there and all their friends, and I guess they didn’t like that. “They” being people in charge. Maybe it was inconvenient, uncomfortable, noisy, who knows what. Maybe it was too happy or too sad, I don’t know. I— anyway, they don’t allow it anymore— another example of how everything is getting stricter and stricter, and sort of less and less human.

So, the lady who takes your license made her phone call and she said, “You’re going to have to wait until one of them comes out.”

And so I was waiting, and this is after going through the metal detector and getting frisked, and giving her my license and just waiting, and then she said, “No, he doesn’t want to see you.”

So I went, Oh, okay.

So I got my license, and I was walking out and then I went, Wait a minute, I made a deal with Mrs. Clay that I was going to meet her and we were going to carpool. So I went back in and I said that to one of the guards who was standing there, and he listened and then he asked the other guy who was standing there to come over and they pointed me to this black car which had a driver in it which was the man that had driven Mrs. Clay and her sister, and that turned out to be her brother, so I went and talked to him, and he said, “Oh, no, I’m very comfortable driving to Huntsville. I know where everything is. You don’t need to worry about us. Just go on. We’ll see you at the Hospitality House.”

So we went and had lunch, went to the Hospitality House, and I was at the point totally exhausted, so I just sat in the recliner and took a nap. And Gracia went for a walk, and I mean going for a walk would have been a really good thing to do, but I was just too tired.

Okay, the guy who runs the Hospitality House and two chaplains had introduced themselves to us when we got there, and there in the kitchen, where they have a big pot of soup for anybody who wants it, and if we had known that, I guess we could have had a free lunch, but we didn’t. We didn’t realize the soup was there, I guess. Anyway— should’ve.

They’re yackety, yack, yack, yacking the whole time. I mean joking around and talking about this and that, and so I go to sleep listening to that and I wake up and they’re still yackety, yack, yack, yacking.

And anyway, Gracia came back from her walk, and Mrs. Clay and her brother and her sister still weren’t there and neither were the other witnesses from his list. He had made a list of people he wanted to invite to be there, and one person he wanted to invite was his brother, James, and James, it turned out, couldn’t come, not because he, James, couldn’t come, but because they wouldn’t let him. And they don’t let anybody come and be a witness if they have a prison record. I don’t know how much of a prison record. I don’t know if one arrest will keep you out, but James had, I guess, more than just one arrest.

It seems to me that like you’re on death row, there’s a pretty good chance that a lot of your people, friends and family, are going to be people with prison records, which kind of limits who you get to invite to be at your execution to be there up until the end showing they care. So James couldn’t come, but he did get to talk to James. Johnny got to talk to James on the telephone that day, which was really great.

I say it was really great because you don’t get to talk to the people you care about on the telephone unless they come to visit you, and you’re on the— So we were in the Hospitality House and lots of prison, prisoner generated art, lots of Christian things and evidence, brochures, and bibles, and the artwork itself—

SOLIS: And the chaplain and the man who runs the Hospitality House, you say they were yacking. What were— were they just not showing any respect to the guests—

JOANNA VAUGHN: Well they were— well I was the only person there.

SOLIS: Okay.

JOANNA VAUGHN: I was the only person there besides them. And they were in the kitchen having a cup of coffee, I guess. And they probably didn’t realize that I could hear every word they said. I mean they weren’t saying anything bad. It was just sort of their general hanging out, yucking it up kind of manner that seemed inappropriate to me.

SOLIS: The reason I ask is because we hear a lot of different kinds of experiences at the Hospitality House, which is one of the reasons I asked.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Uh huh, uh huh. Right, so let’s see.

Then— oh, okay, there was a little glitch about my name because of my handwriting. Johnny had always misspelled my name and I had never corrected him, and he had misspelled it based on the way I write my letter G, so he thought my name was V-A-U-P-H-Y, it’s V-A-U-G-H-N. And so he had put me down with that last name, and if your last name doesn’t match, you don’t get to go in.

So one of the chaplains, I don’t know which one, noticed the discrepancy ahead of time and had already cleared it up, which was just great ‘cause otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten to go in, which would have been really, really a drag for everybody, I think. There’s water over there.

CRAFTS: Oh, thanks.

JOANNA VAUGHN: So Mrs. Clay came and I recognized her voice ‘cause I had heard her voice on the telephone, so I went up and met her and met her sister and I had already met her brother, and it turned out the other people on the list just didn’t show up.

SOLIS: Were these— were they family members of Johnny, or friends?

JOANNA VAUGHN: One of them was a lady who lives in San Antonio, and he said that she’d only been to see him once, but that she’d recently expressed interest because he didn’t have much time to go and she was feeling like she really wanted to come see him again and so he had put her on this witness list, but he said the reason she only came once was because her job keeps her busy all the time, so I guess it wasn’t surprising. Also, her phone is unlisted, so I couldn’t call her ‘cause he didn’t have her phone to give me. He gave her my phone, but she didn’t call me. He gave her Mrs. Clay’s phone, but she didn’t call Mrs. Clay, and then the chaplains called, like the chaplains who had called me, I wasn’t home, but they had left a message with Larry, and they couldn’t call her because they didn’t have her phone number.

There was somebody else they did call, but I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know who the other people were— persons. So then the chaplain whose last name was Hart, H-A-R-T, Hart was there to give us orientation and he did a really, really, really thorough job, and I really appreciated it.

SOLIS: Was he just explaining the process?

JOANNA VAUGHN: Exactly what we were going to experience, and he said when you get to the actual room where you’re going to be looking into the execution chamber, you’re going to feel like you’re in there forever. He said, “You’re only going to be in there for a few minutes, but it’s going to feel like forever.”

And just every, every, every step of the way he gave us a preview of what we’re going to see, do, experience, and I told him afterwards, they should do such a good job before you go to the hospital before you have an operation. Well this is going to happen, this is going to happen ‘cause they never do, and it’s really nice to know ahead of time what you’re going to experience, I think.

So at that point, then there’s just waiting. We hear all this information, and then its chaplain goes off with Mrs. Clay because she’s the spiritual advisor and they go to have this last visit. And then, what do you do? You’re just waiting and waiting and waiting.

SOLIS: Are you at the administrative building at this point?

JOANNA VAUGHN: No, we’re still at the Hospitality House. And he was, I think, he was in a room where you did— Okay, when Mrs. Clay went to visit him then, she said that there wasn’t any glass. It was like the first time she had been able to see him with no glass, as far as I know, ‘cause she’s been visiting him for eight years, and she has been visiting him ever since her son, Keith Clay, was executed in 2008, no 2002. I’m sorry. So I guess that’s seven years. And maybe she started visiting Johnny before her son died, I don’t know.

Anyway, so they had a good visit and she came back and then he had his last meal, which, the way they wrote it in the newspaper, I mean it sounded— I don’t know. Okay, I kind of wish I hadn’t read the newspaper account ‘cause it definitely was slanted. It wasn’t just objective, it didn’t sound like to me, but maybe, maybe I just was overly-sensitive, but it sounded like it was slanted to the negative, like sort of negative innuendo, negative innuendo, negative innuendo.

So, anyway, he was enjoying his last meal and he got to call us on the telephone at Hospitality House, so I talked to him and then I passed the phone to Mrs. Clay, then she passed it to her sister, and her brother, and everybody got to talk to Johnny, and then the phone call was over. We all had to say goodbye, and that was it. I mean at this point the chaplain said if— it was something about until he actually leaves such and such a room, there’s still a possibility for legal intervention.

And actually the chaplains had asked me, “Do you know if there’s any legal stuff still outstanding?”

And I had told them, well you know, what I told you. I did know that something had been filed, but that’s all I knew. And they were like, “Oh, okay. So this might take longer than— it might not go exactly like clockwork. It might take longer.”

I mean they even told us it could take as long as midnight. You don’t know, depending on the courts. But evidently, whatever was filed didn’t make a dent in it, so—

SOLIS: May I ask what you and Johnny talked about on the phone?

JOANNA VAUGHN: He told me what he was eating, and what else? I’m not sure. Let me think.

SOLIS: What was his mood?

JOANNA VAUGHN: He was cheerful. I mean like I said, he had this great laugh, okay. He was enjoying his food. He was enjoying the conversation. He was just kind of enjoying being alive, as far as I could tell. You know, I don’t really know what we talked about. It’s interesting. What do you talk about with — I mean—

LARRY VAUGHN: Tell about what he had for his last meal. That was interesting.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Oh, he had, I think, chickenfried steak and chicken, and eggs, and garlic bread, and they didn’t have any shrimp, so he couldn’t have shrimp. He ordered shrimp and he couldn’t have any. Coffee with cream and sugar, that’s all I can remember.

And that was interesting, actually, because when I had met him on the Saturday previous, part of visiting always is getting a bag of food for the person you’re visiting from the machines, and I had asked him because I didn’t know him at all, What kind of food would you like?

And he had said that he would like some salad and if they had any fruit. And I said, Well they have nuts, too, and do you want some meat ‘cause they’ve got sandwiches and these reconstituted chicken things called Drummies, and he said, “No, I don’t want any meat. I’m more into the healthy eating thing.”

And so he got nuts, and trail mix, and fruit, like an apple. They didn’t have any oranges, and salad, and he wanted some chips. So it was kind of interesting to me that he had emphasized that he was into healthy eating but then for his last meal, he ordered chicken fried steak and chicken and eggs. But, man if you think about— I mean one of the things about being free, right, you get to choose what you eat. Unless you’re a baby or a really old person locked up in a nursing home or somebody in the hospital, you get to choose what you eat.

And that’s a pretty big deal about being human, you get to choose what you put into your own mouth. So you definitely don’t get a whole lot of choice, although there is commissary, but he didn’t— I don’t know how much income he had when he was one death row in terms of people sending him money. I know he was short on paper and stuff like that to write with, and in the three years that I wrote to him, he only asked me twice, could I send some money for stationary supplies, and I did. Maybe ten dollars, twenty dollars, so he definitely was not trying to milk the relationship for financial gain, which I hear some of them do, but I’ve not run into it myself. So—

SOLIS: You were talking about how everyone had just said goodbye on the telephone to—

JOANNA VAUGHN: Yeah, we had all just said goodbye. I guess they probably rounded us up then we got in the cars and drove, ‘cause I don’t remember anything between there. And pretty much with a very sober, sober, somber attitude at this point, but we drove over there.

Gracia got out of the car and went over off the property to be with the protestors and the rest of us went with the chaplains to— Oh, and the brother stayed. Mrs. Clay’s brother stayed at the Hospitality House ‘cause he wasn’t on the list.

So we went and we couldn’t get in. It was pretty funny. These two employees, and I don’t know if they were the chaplains or if they were— they must have just been the two chaplains, they didn’t— I guess they didn’t feel comfortable even bending a rule just a little bit, right? So there were all these people getting off of work from this office building that we were going into, this office building that was all prison at the Walls Unit. And they didn’t grab the door and go on in because the person who was supposed to come get us hadn’t come to the door. There was some acronym, like O.I.G. maybe, Officer In Guard. That doesn’t make sense. Anyway, the acronym was for the person who was supposed to come get us, or the type of person who was supposed to come get us.

So we were standing on the sidewalk, all these people are leaving ‘cause work is over and here come two people who are from the National Geographic film crew, and they have no hesitation about grabbing the door and going on in, and the chaplains are sort of morally outraged because these guys aren’t going by the rules. They are going in without permission, and they said, “Well, we’re supposed to be on the other side. We’re just going to go through the building.”

And zup, they go. And then another person from the National Geographic comes along, and the chaplains tell this person, his name is Mark, “Your people went in there,” like something really terrible has happened, and he’s not really too worried about it and I think he did the same thing: just got the door— I don’t know how, what he did. Maybe he walked around the building.

But anyway, so we’re still standing there. I mean we’re standing there for a long time, and it’s just kind of interesting. Two elderly ladies, one of them with a problem with her knee ‘cause she’s got an artificial knee, and myself, and these two chaplains standing out on the sidewalk seriously at least five minutes, maybe ten, and finally somebody says something to somebody and we get in.

And then we go upstairs and Mrs. Clay is so glad that she gets to use the elevator and not the stairs, and then we go and sit and wait again. This time we’re sitting and waiting in the snack room where people take their breaks and — Oh, they have to take us into another room and frisk us first. Do they have to do anything else to us? I think it’s just frisk us and see our I.D.s, and maybe we had to take our shoes off. I don’t really remember.

So then Mrs. Clay and her sister and I are sitting around, and I don’t remember if the chaplains were there. I think they were someplace else, so it was just the three of us and we start talking about our kids, you know, how many kids do you have? Boys? girls?

And Mrs. Clay is talking about her son who died and her son who was executed, and all she’s got now is girls and her sister just has girls. So we’re having this kind of moms’ conversation, and then it was time to go, and then we didn’t talk at all. We just walked without talking, silently and met up with, I guess there were three reporters, and they didn’t say a word. They didn’t ask us anything. They didn’t say anything to each other that I heard.

And we’re all standing in the hallway waiting to go into the witness room, and as I said, with this really, really, really sober, somber feeling. Nobody says a word. I did ask them if this was a place where prisoners still were kept, and they said, “Yes.”

And we were standing in a very clean, actually amazingly nice smelling, much somehow nicer than the Polunsky Unit hallway. And the hallway was adjoining a visitation area. And I can’t remember— I—

Okay, I think the thing I was going over and over in my head was this song— do you know taizé? T-A-I-Z-E, with an accent? It’s a community. Anyway, they have these chant kind of songs, and so I think the one that was going in my mind was: Hoobie cari ta seta more. Hoobie cari tas dey you sibbie es. Where there’s love and caring there is God.

I think that’s — I mean I was probably doing that as a self-soothing activity as much as anything else. I don’t think that I was humming. I don’t think I was making any sound outwardly. Mrs. Clay was leaning against the wall and when the door opened, we’d been told ahead —

[deleted at narrator’s request]

Anyway, this door opens and they say, “Door Open,” and they say that because they want the people in the execution chamber to know that the door is open. I’m not quite sure why, some kind of procedural thing.

And so then we go in and I didn’t realize there are no chairs in there. That was the one thing that I wasn’t prepared for: big, big, big, big picture window, no chairs. So Mrs. Clay and her sister are up against the window over here. The chaplains have been very solicitous of Mrs. Clay this whole time, partly because they’re worried she’s going to fall down, and I’m over here, and the reporters are all back here.

So they can’t see as well, but I’m sure they can see, and I just look through the window the whole time, and Johnny, of course, was already on the gurney and he already had the tape and the needles and a cloth, and Chaplain Hart was there with his hand on his ankle which he told us he would be for human contact and this other man.

I didn’t know who the other man was, turned out it was the warden. I don’t know his last name. He looked kind of grimly like that Chaplain Pickett from At the Death House Door, but he wasn’t— different guy, and he never said a word.

He just stood behind Johnny’s head, like at the head, and then the chaplain was at the feet. So Johnny turned— I mean he was like— he’s this way, and we’re over there where you are, and so he’s lying down and he could turn his head and he turned his head, and he looked at us and he smiled and he— I don’t know if he said, “Hello,” or what, but he was asked if he wanted to say anything and he had prepared a speech, and he had a little trouble getting started and I don’t know if he had already gotten some kind of medicine injection that made it hard for him to get his thoughts together, but he got started and he had several things he wanted to say and it’s all written down.

And I want to say that of the four people that I’ve corresponded with, he has repeatedly talked about the death row community, and whenever anybody would get executed that he knew, he would write about them and tell what a loss it was to the death row community that so and so had been executed and tell why, what the person’s contribution was to the death row community.

And so— I don’ t know if there’s anything in particular from his— from the words that he said that— He talked about the dungeon, he talked about the isolation, he asked for people on the outside to work against the death penalty, and he also ended with a song and he sang “Jesus keep me near the cross, there’s a bright and shining,” and then that was all he could get out, then the poisons or the medicine kicked in and he couldn’t sing anymore, couldn’t talk anymore, lost consciousness, and as the chaplain had told us, it sounded like he was snoring.

He said, “It’s just going to sound like he’s snoring.” And it did.

Time for the end, right? Okay, so that’s an hour.

[Tape 1 Ends]
[Tape 2 Begins]

SOLIS: You were just—

JOANNA VAUGHN: I was just saying his last words were from this song, “Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross, There’s a Bright and Shining,” and then he died. I guess he died right then.

I mean there was this— his eyes were closed and it sounded like he was snoring and that’s what the chaplain said we should anticipate.

And at that point, Mrs. Clay said words to the effect of “He’s with Jesus now. He’s in a better place.” She’s a very strong Christian.

Then we just waited. More waiting, I mean the waiting part is really amazing in terms of just— I mean what do you do when you can’t do anything? Well, you look at the clock, see what time it is. Oh, it’s six-fifteen, it’s six-sixteen, it’s six-seventeen, it’s six-eighteen, it’s six-nineteen. Maybe look at the doctor who comes in and puts a stethoscope in to see if Johnny is alive or dead, and I guess lifts his eyelids and closes his eyelids, and what else? What else did he do to see if Johnny was alive or dead?

Anyway, he was dead, and I guess at that point they ushered us out, and I didn’t look at the clock. Yeah?

SOLIS: What were you thinking?

JOANNA VAUGHN: You know, I wish I could say what I was thinking. I probably was embarrassed that— I mean this is an embarrassing thing to say, but I think I was embarrassed that I wasn’t more emotional. The whole thing was so orchestrated and I think I was embarrassed that I wasn’t more emotionally responsive at that point. I had one tissue, and that’s all I needed. I guess I kind of felt like I should need a whole bunch of tissues, but I didn’t. And I’m going to say that—

Okay, you know I said that Johnny really wanted us to see if he was really dead, and one of the things he laughed about the Saturday before was kind of macabre, but he had said, “You’re not afraid to touch a dead body, are you?”

And I said, I don’t think so. I touched my mom after she died. I touched my dad after he died.

And he said, “Cause I am.”

And he laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed. Now this is that part that’s like a little— you really have to wonder, Okay. Here’s a guy that according to his whatever you read under his face if you Google him, definitely had touched a dead body according to the criminal report.

According to his report, that Saturday, he had never touched a dead body because when he was five or six, right over here on Rosewood Avenue, and he is fifty-one, he was fifty-one, so that would have been forty-five years ago, he had watched his Uncle Lee get stabbed to death. Stabbed repeatedly over and over and over in this bar, and he had run home to get his daddy ‘cause Uncle Lee was getting stabbed to death.

And he had been so freaked out, and he had gone, he said, to the funeral of Uncle Lee, and his aunt had tried to get him to touch Uncle Lee’s dead body in the coffin, and he screamed and hollered and carried on and wouldn’t touch the dead body for anything.

So you put that story, which was like a horrendous thing to happen to a kid, and he said at the time, Saturday he said, “I can see it as clear as day right now, as if it’s happening right now.”

Like the image of this hugely violent experience had stayed with him very vividly. Okay, you put that together with all the charges against him, and it’s like how do you put those together? Here’s a guy who says he’s never touched a dead body because of that childhood incident, and he’s scared to. And here’s a guy who supposedly has killed people and raped the dead bodies. Yuck. How is it possible that this is the same guy?

So I mean I actually asked Jude, What do you think?

And she said, “Well, maybe he had a split personality and this one didn’t know what this one was doing.”

It’s possible. That’s the creepy part. There are creepy parts, very creepy. I’m the kind of person— I don’t like watching violent movies. Larry will tell you, I complain if anybody shoots anybody, if anybody screams, if there’s any dun dun dun dun sound in the movie, I’m out of there. Turn it off, or I’m leaving, so. It’s not like I’m inured to violence.

So back to the actual events of Thursday: we all go back to Hospitality House, Gracia is driving the car. I’m in the car, Mrs. Clay is in the car and her sister, Mrs. Phillips, are in the car, is in the car, and we all drive back to Hospitality House where Johnny Johnson’s property is being put in the trunk of Mrs. Clay’s car, and she is ready to go to the funeral home, but we can’t go yet because we have to be debriefed. And so we all go back in to get debriefed.

Debriefing wasn’t very long. The same chaplain, Chaplain Hart, wanted to tell us about the time period between the end of the phone call and the actual execution, and he said that — Actually, while Johnny was on the phone with us, he had to hang up and talk to a lawyer on the phone, on another phone, and then he called us back. And there was another lawyer call, so they were still working right up to the very end.

So Chaplain Hart said that after these two phone calls, where the lawyers told him that they were working, working, working to try to get him a stay, Johnny said to the chaplain apparently, “Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to stay alive, but these lawyer calls are a little distracting. Chaplain, can you help me get my focus back on Jesus because it’s hard for me to keep focused on Jesus with these lawyer phone calls.”

So then we were able to leave, and it was kind of like you go to a wedding and you shake everybody’s hands, or you go to a funeral and you shake everybody’s hands. Somehow there’s this line above the chaplains plus the guy who runs the Hospitality House. I’ll put them in this order ‘cause I’m coming along here, and I don’t know exactly which order. I think this was Chaplain Hart, and I did tell him I was grateful for his very good preparation, and then there was the guy who runs the Hospitality House. I had given him a twenty-dollar bill, and had said no thanks for the receipt ‘cause it says “Donations Requested. We Can’t Run Without Donations.”

And all I’d gotten— all I’d used was toilet paper and flushed the toilet, used his recliner for awhile and ate one banana. So anyways, it was a nice banana. Oh, I had a cup of coffee.

Anyway, but I really felt like he was shaking my hand and moving me out of there, like “good riddance.” That was the feeling I got from him physically and otherwise. Maybe he could tell that despite all my smiling and nodding, I wasn’t as Christian as the rest of them.

Very big chance of that. I didn’t say the right words ‘cause they’re all saying a lot of things about Jesus, and I don’t have any problem with Jesus, it’s just that I’m not as devout a Christian as they are by any means.

So anyway, then we shook hands with a couple more chaplains and were out the door and driving to the funeral home and when we got to the funeral home, here’s that guy who was so distraught, and he’s so relieved because a piece of paper came from the prison making it clear that Mrs. Clay could have things the way she had planned it, and so the other party, whoever it was, didn’t get to have Johnny’s body.

And he informed us that the National Geographic crew was already in there with Johnny’s body and the National Geographic crew had been visiting Johnny every Wednesday I guess for quite some time, which I didn’t know about, and— Okay, you asked me, What did Johnny talk about on the phone when we were in the Hospitality House?

One thing he said was about this National Geographic crew and he said, “Mark is the guy from National Geographic, and I want you to talk to him. Now don’t be shy like you were with me,” he said, “Talk to him.”

But I didn’t talk to him. I mean I shook hands with him and met him. That was all.

So the chaplain, whichever chaplain it was with us, I don’t know which one, said to the funeral home director whose name was Whatley, W-H-A-T-L-E-Y, and he’d only been there in Huntsville six weeks, “Could you please get the National Geographic crew out of there, so that these people can have some time with the body alone with privacy?”

And so Mr. Whatley said, “Okay,” and he did, so we went in and there were no film crew people, no cameras or anything, and as I said, we touched his body and actually, Mrs. Clay lifted up this cloth because she wanted to see what was underneath. I mean he was covered up to his chest and the way it was, actually, they had taken his arm which still had the tape and I think it’s— I didn’t look really carefully, but Gracia had warned me this was going to be really gross, they’re going to still have needles and tape in his arm ‘cause they won’t have done anything to his body. So they had tucked his hand into the white elastic pants, and I guess the other hand as well.

And so Mrs. Clay is feeling him to see if he’s warm or cold, which was kind of interesting, just on one side, and they’re feeling his neck and saying he’s kind of puffy and swollen; it must be from the medicine, and doesn’t his hair look nice, and the brother kind of went like this on Johnny’s forehead.

It’s really weird when you have never actually touched somebody in real life, to touch their dead body because they asked you to, please, to make sure they were dead. I didn’t feel his face or anything because I just didn’t feel comfortable, but I felt his shoulder and it wasn’t stiff or anything. He was just barely dead. It was less than maybe half an hour since — I don’t know what time it was, but it was before seven, and he was executed at six-fifteen.

They wear these jumpsuits. He was not executed wearing a jumpsuit. He was executed wearing a white prison outfit, but it had the elastic pants which means he was— elastic waistband which means he was wearing general population clothes, ‘cause otherwise they couldn’t have tucked his hand in, for what that’s worth.

He looked really peaceful, but this eyebrow had kind of like a plaintive curl to it, like asking a question.

Mrs. Clay, of course, over and over ever since he had died, had been saying from time to time about how he’s with Jesus now and how he’s in a better place, doesn’t he look peaceful, and all that kind of stuff. I didn’t say, Yeah but look at the eyebrow. Look at that eyebrow. I’m just kind of being supportive to her.

Her sister didn’t seem to be in a particularly stressed state, but who knows? Her sister said, “His letters were so interesting. His letters were so interesting.”

And she couldn’t really say the word “interesting.” She couldn’t say “inter-esting” or “interesting.” She just had a funny way of saying it, and I was almost trying to practice saying how she said it, like “insertress— Anyway, it was just a hard word for her to say.

I’m going to back up. We’re in the Hospitality House, we’re waiting, and they’re having this big conversation, which I’m not a part of, about milking cows before you go to school, milking cows when you come home, plowing the fields, doing all this farm work. This is the chaplains, and Mrs. Clay, and her sister. Who did the farm work, who did the house work, who really worked.

And it’s like which people and Black people in rural Texas comparing their rural roots, and Mrs. Clay and her brother really love the country. I don’t know about her sister. They don’t like the city, but I guess maybe they— at least she said, “A lot of people will retire and go back to the country, ‘cause that’s real good living there.”

She’s very, very, very glad that he became a Christian. Very, very, very proud of him, very proud of her own son, that he became a Christian. She said of her own son, “He went right through high school, I never had any trouble with him. He had two years of college and then he started hanging out with the wrong crowd.”

But she was so proud of both of them for being Christians and for being a good influence for others on death row, and that she has nothing to be ashamed of. She can hold her head up and that Johnny, like her son, deserves a headstone with his name, and some dates and words on it, that he deserves an identity, just like anybody else. Not just a number and have his body thrown in the ground in a sack.

Both of them said that— Okay, the reason Johnny wanted us to make sure that he was really dead was because he said, “You know, people that don’t have families, they just give them the first drug to make them look like they’re dead, and then they wake up in an underground government facility and they’re being guinea pigs in some science experiment.”

Okay, so I ran that one by Mrs. Clay, and she said, “Oh yes, they harvest their organs. Don’t you know that? That’s a well-known fact. They harvest their organs.”

I said, How can they do that since they won’t allow them to donate their organs to science, or their bodies because of the poison?

“Oh but they do. They sell it and then they make money off of it.”

I don’t know. I don’t know if this is myth or fact, but they both felt like if you didn’t have somebody to look out for you, they’re going to harvest your organs and make money off your body, and just be disrespectful.

So, anything else? We said, “Goodbye.”

The National Geographic crew came back in.

Oh, one more thing, okay? The funeral home guy, Mr. Whatley, came in and said that the other funeral home guy was going to come tomorrow morning after we have prepared the body, and Mrs. Clay said, “What? No, he was supposed to be here at six-thirty,” and it’s already quarter of seven.

“Oh, we talked on the phone,” said the funeral guy. “He’ll be here tomorrow morning at seven-thirty after we have prepared the body. We’re going to do the preparations.”

She said, “What preparations? He’s getting cremated. What preparations?”

So the funeral home was about to make some money off of the situation by embalming somebody’s body, which was going to get cremated, without being asked to, without being told to. And she was not about to let that happen.

Gracia said, “Is that what you want?”

And “Absolutely not. Absolutely not.”

And so at that point the National Geographic crew had come back in, they were filming all of this, and Mr. Whatley went back in to call the other funeral home guy from over near Jasper, where Mrs. Clay lives, and I figured she could take care of it, and it was getting close to seven o’clock and I had to go to work the next day, so we left and got in the car and drove home.

SOLIS: How have you been this past week?

JOANNA VAUGHN: Well, let’s see. I have been wanting to sleep a whole lot. I mean I’ve gone to bed early, and the first day afterwards I just was — fortunately I didn’t have to teach. There was an in-service day.

I ran into so and so and I said, How are you? And he started telling me his sad tale of woe, and I listened and didn’t say anything about where I’d been the day before, and that pretty much went on all day. I didn’t tell anybody, and it kind of made everything feel very unreal, like I was in some other dimension. I was there, and I was doing everything we were doing, but it was like this whole other reality was also present, and I didn’t have much appetite. I’ll say that. I’ve actually lost weight since last week. I’ve lost about three pounds.

Then the next day we had this support committee meeting, which is something we had planned ahead of time. And it wasn’t a meeting really, I’m sorry, it was open to anyone at the Friends Meeting, but the only people that came were people that were actively involved with anti-death penalty work. So there were nine people there, and I got these flowers and brought them, and Galia who, along with her husband, Howard, who witnessed their nephew’s execution three years ago, brought these tulips, and then some people brought candles, and I brought this just so there’d be some handwriting of Johnny’s, so you might want to look at his handwriting.

SOLIS: What is that on the back of the envelope?

JOANNA VAUGHN: On the back?

SOLIS: Did he do that, or?

JOANNA VAUGHN: No, that’s my notes to myself. And I put his photo up also. So I don’t know. I that where you want it to—

SOLIS: Yeah, that’s great.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Because these booths are so dark, and because white people and black people make the camera get confused, it’s hard for them to get a good photo with their digital camera of a black inmate with a white visitor, unless there’s a light right above. But I think I can lighten this up on the— anyway, you can see his beautiful smile.

SOLIS: Nice.

JOANNA VAUGHN: I think I can lighten it up on the machine that we have.

Anyway, so we had this meeting, which was I guess partly our usual silent meeting for worship, which is how we do things, and also partly a memorial for Johnny. And everybody contributed something, either saying something— Galia went and got the hymnbooks and we sang “Amazing Grace,” and we might have sung something else, I just don’t remember. So that was helpful. That was really helpful. It was really helpful to me to know that these people at the Friends Meeting had really been holding Gracia and me and Johnny in the light during this whole experience on Thursday, had really been— had really cared about us, and still did enough to show up on Saturday morning, and so on and so forth.

So, I think I sang really loud. I don’t know. It was a funny combination of wanting to just really celebrate being alive, like I’m alive, and I found myself the next few days after that Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, this whole week, if anybody said, “Hi, how are you?” I’d say, I’m alive. I’m alive. I didn’t explain it. Just I’m alive. You’re alive. We’re alive.

SOLIS: That’s a wonderful feeling.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Yeah, it’s worth taking note of. But like I said, I also was exhausted emotionally slash physically, and slept a lot. I went for acupuncture, and Marty said that my pulses were messed up, that my heart beat is erratic, and I should take this Chinese herb for heart, because dun dun dun dun. Anyway—

SOLIS: I have a couple more questions, if that’s okay with you.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Yeah, yeah.

SOLIS: But before I ask those questions, I don’t know if you’re interested in maybe saying a few words about Eugene or Robert: what your communication with them is, what your relationship with them is, what they’re like, if you care to.

JOANNA VAUGHN: I want to say about Robert that when I met Johnny on Saturday the seventh, I specifically brought up that Robert was the one to thank for us being there because he had really urged me to write to Johnny, and Johnny had said, “That’s funny. It’s funny that he would go to that effort if he doesn’t show any signs of caring about me one way or the other back here on this side.”

And Robert had a date. Robert got all the way up to the point of thinking today is my last day to live, and he got a stay based on I’m not quite sure what. I think it’s having to do with mental retardation issues. He’s borderline retarded. He’s hoping that he’ll be put in general population instead of getting executed.

He, like Johnny, is very religious, but he’s not as intelligent and questioning. He’s just able to wake up every morning and give thanks to God for being alive, which, under the circumstances, is pretty amazing. And for me, we tend to complain about stuff, right? Like, the weather, have to go to work, or whatever. So for me, getting letters from somebody who starts every morning saying how grateful he is to God for another day, and that day he’s going to spend twenty-three hours of it in his cell.

And I’m not locked up, and I have so many choices, and I have the sky, and I have my husband, I have my family, I have my friends, I have my job, I have my car, I have my house. I have this incredible abundance, but sometimes I don’t— I need a little nudge to appreciate the fact that all that is ours. And so for me, he’s a very good influence.

He’s a very good influence, and I would say Eugene likewise. Eugene, of all the people I correspond with, is the least religious. He said he’s tried it for a while, it didn’t really stick, but I think he’s gone back to being religious, but he doesn’t do the religious talk that the other ones do. Ask Jesus, put your faith in Jesus, thank God, and so on and so forth, which, like I said, I don’t have any problem with.

But Eugene is the only one who, of the ones that I correspond with, who attests to his innocence and he said, “I didn’t kill anybody.”

He said, “I definitely wasn’t living a good life. I was a drug dealer. I liked the drugs. I liked the free sex. I liked the power. I liked the gun. I like having a fancy car— all that. But I never killed anybody.”

So, he said he had given up robbing after he’d gotten locked up for robbery and he’d given that up. What else do you do if you’re illiterate? Sell drugs. Eugene and Robert both learned how to read in prison. Eugene and Robert and Johnny all dropped out of school. Eugene, Robert, Carlos, and Johnny all dropped out of school early. Eugene, I think, made it through fifth grade and he was already seventh grade age and he just kept getting passed on and he also was put in a boys’ home because his mother was judged to be incompetent, neglecting him. He also witnessed a violent crime. I think his brother killed his brother’s friend in their living room by accident. I mean I don’t remember exactly the circumstances, but that was something that happened when he was little.

Okay, so that’s Eugene, and his brother and sister, actually half brother and sister, and he’s the youngest, he was born out of wedlock to somebody else that wasn’t his mother’s husband, didn’t know his father, met him a couple of times, wondered why he didn’t look like the other people in his family, had a different name. His brother and sister were very abusive to him. His mother was fairly abusive, but his brother and sister were really abusive.

Carlos, Hispanic from San Antonio, his mom just wanted to party, and so he was out on the street when he was six, seven, eight years old, taking care of himself and his little brother.

He said, “I always like violence, I just liked violence.” And he got into a gang, and actually, he— the only time he’s ever said anything about his crime, he indicated that he had taken the rap for someone else in his gang. I don’t know.

SOLIS: I want to ask about Johnny Johnson’s childhood.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Yeah. I want to just kind of go on to Robert. Robert said that because he was retarded, he was really subject to peer pressure. He wanted to fit in. He always felt like he wasn’t like the other people, and so the drugs and the violence and stuff, and he felt like his message to young people is “Don’t let that peer pressure lead you into a bad place.”

Okay, and then Johnny was born here in Austin, and what do I know about his childhood? Well, besides his watching his uncle get stabbed to death, there was another letter that was so hard to read. I mean really, really hard to read, and it was about his father not being physically abusive to him at that moment, but his father and mother fought all the time physically, like big time, and they took turns being in and out of jail and/or prison.

His mother had something that most Black women at that time didn’t have and that was a high school diploma, which she lorded over his father, but the way that she made money apparently was to take the kids in the car and go knock the change things off of washing machines in the laundromat to make money, and also to take the kids in the back seat of the car and lure men into the front seat and then have the kids help her beat him up and then get his money.

The lady at Texas Defenders said, “I think she also turned tricks and maybe he just hasn’t felt comfortable saying that part.”

So Johnny started school over here at Blackshear Elementary, and I want to go to Blackshear sometime and see if they have any old photos from forty-five years ago, see if I can see a first grade photo. I really want to see a photo of him as a kid.

His parents both ended up in jail at the same time, were in prison at the same time. He went with his uncle and aunt. Uncle Hurler(sp?_ and Aunt— I’ve got it written down, but I can’t remember it right now. They lived over here where the projects are now on twelfth street in a house, but then I don’t know if they died first or if he was removed from their home and put in foster care, but he was put in foster care. His brother, James, was put in foster care. There were half siblings and I think three girls and one boy, or four girls and one boy were kept together as a unit and put with their own relatives up in Taylor.

But he and his brother, James, were put in foster homes. James was put in a foster home, I don’t know if it was up near the Saint John’s area and he was put in a foster home in Sunset Valley, one of many. I don’t know where all he was.

And he said when his mother got out and found out where James was, “She went and jacked him out of there, but she didn’t jack me out because she didn’t like me because I looked more like my father,” he said. His father’s name was Jesse, so “When she saw me, she saw Jesse.” I guess they had had this big love/hate relationship and his father went off to California with an older brother, and they were in the business of robbing banks and his father got killed, and he doesn’t know what happened to that brother, whose name was also Jesse, like Jesse Senior, Jesse Junior.

James lives in Houston. I’d like to meet James. I’m assuming that Mrs. Clay is going to invite James to the gravesite service, which isn’t set. There’s not date set for it because when you have a cremation you don’t have any urgency.

But anyway, there’s a half brother. He said his name was Jerry Wright. He said he works at U.T. in Austin. I don’t know if it makes any sense to contact him.

I don’t know anything about the sisters. He was clearly a really smart person, really smart person.

But he said it was really hard because of changing schools all the time and they had a different curriculum at different schools, and so he just gave up and quit going to school and he was driving a truck for one of his foster fathers. I said, Oh did he get you a license?

“No,” he said, “I went an got the book and I studied it and I got the license myself.”

And then with that license, a truck-driving license, and he’d been driving trucks since he was fourteen, he accidentally, coincidentally found his mom again and went to Houston either because his mom was going to Houston or with his mom. Anyway, he got into this job pool thing where they would send him out to drive a truck ‘cause he had a license. He said, “I didn’t know how to drive trucks.”

And we laughed, and laughed, and laughed. He only knew how to drive this one kind of truck that his foster father had. He said, “So you know, I’d stripped the gears, and I’d back into something, and I’d mess up their truck big time and they’d fire me like in three hours.”

But he said, “Then they’d send me out to another company the next day ‘cause I had a license and they were making money off me, so you know.”

And he just thought it was hilarious the way he had learned to drive this wide variety of trucks was by wrecking all these trucks. I mean some of the things he laughed at were a little iffy.

But I mean he laughed that his brother, James, had been in prison for two years because he worked on some guy’s house and the guy hadn’t paid him or had only paid him half and he’d wanted to give the guy a wakeup call, so he lit a fire but the fire got out of control and burned the house down, so he was in prison for arson, and he laughed and laughed, like laughed that the fire got out of control.

I’m like, since the house next door burned down, I don’t think this is very funny.

Anyway, the other thing— Okay, so I didn’t tell you the horrible story. I didn’t tell you the horrible story. I don’t really feel like telling you the horrible story, actually.

SOLIS: That’s fine.

JOANNA VAUGHN: A horrible childhood story. So all these guys— I’m a teacher, right? I don’t teach classroom, I teach art, but I have taught reading and I know you’ve got to learn how to read otherwise your life is going to be really bad. And all these guys had limited school experiences. At least two of them didn’t learn to read in school. Didn’t learn to read until they were adults in prison. They went all through their teens being illiterate and into adulthood being illiterate.

So I guess, why am I going there? I’m going there because as a teacher this is for me — they talk about the school-to-prison pipeline, right, and that some kids are thought of as disposable or a certain percentage of kids are “at-risk.”

What does “at-risk” mean? Well it means they’re probably going to end up in prison or something like that, drop out, whatever. Disposable.

So my thinking is everybody on the planet is somebody’s kid, right? Everybody in prison is somebody’s kid, and used to be a kid, and went to school probably. Nowadays there’s a lot of home-schooling, but forty or fifty years ago, home schooling was pretty unusual unless you were in Mexico or something and couldn’t go ‘cause you lived on a ranch and it was too far away from a school.

So these are all products of our school system: everybody in prison, of our school system failing to meet their needs as small human beings and as students. I’m not saying that the schools are completely at fault, obviously. All of the people I correspond with have dreadful and different versions of dreadful home lives, and all of—

I don’t know about Robert. I know that he had a stepfather, not a father, but he did have a man in the house and he did stay in his house with his mom. He didn’t get farmed out to foster care, I don’t think.

-- But all three of the other guys, they were gone from their own homes by fifth grade, if not before.

So it’s like looking at the kids that I know in class and trying not to be a contributing factor to push any of them in this direction because I know what’s at the end of it and I don’t want any of these kids, no matter how annoying they are, I don’t want any of them to go there, but sometimes it’s really, really hard ‘cause if there’s a kid who has a really bad attitude, is really uncooperative, is making life really difficult for me and everybody else in the class, it’s really hard for me not to be verbally abusive or emotionally abusive, just to get combative and stuff.

I’m certainly not a saint. I’ve got forty-five minutes with this group of kids. I’m trying to get something done, and this kid is really making it really hard by whatever means. So then it’s like, oh, oh that’s right. I really don’t want this kid to go to jail, no matter how horrible they are right now, so for me it’s like a reminder.

SOLIS: Well this is actually perfect for my next question.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Next question.

SOLIS: Just the way you articulated that out makes perfect sense, and so my question is, why Texas? Why Texas? Why is there such a problem with the birth-to-prison pipeline, and problems with the legal and penal system in general the most horrible, in my opinion, being the death penalty. Why Texas, in your opinion? The way you —

JOANNA VAUGHN: Well, I think and Larry thinks, we think it’s the holdover from the slavery days.

LARRY VAUGHN: The holdover from slavery.

JOANNA VAUGHN: That the — and I know that not all people in prison are Black, but a lot of the prisons are on plantations, or kind of run on the plantation system. Not death row, ‘cause they’re not allowed out to do any work, but we know another guy who was in regular prison and he was out there chopping cotton pretty much like the slaves did and not getting paid for it or if they were paid, it was very little.

So that’s what I think, that Texas— well I know that Austin, not Texas as a whole maybe, but Austin, surprisingly, was really, really, really slow to change over to integrated schools. They slash we did everything possible to do anything but. Let’s send some of these teachers over there, put some Black teachers in the white schools. Let’s send— it’s like let’s just bus the first graders, crisscross.

I don’t know all the different things they did to avoid actually integrating the schools here, but I do know that when I first moved here in 1981 I was completely unaware of it that in 1980 the judge had finally said, “Okay, you lose. It’s been decades now since 1954, when integration was supposed to happen in the schools and it’s not happening so y’all have to start bussing.”

And nobody— well it didn’t last very long. I’m not quite sure why it didn’t last very long, but now it’s basically back to neighborhood schools and wealthy schools and poor schools.

And at one point, some school board in Austin said that schools east of I-35 should have a maximum number of seventeen kids per class. That’s no longer something that anybody pays attention to. School boards change. One school board can say something like that and the next school board doesn’t even know they said it.

So, I can go on and on about the inequities in A.I.S.D. as just a small example between the east side schools and the west side schools and the poor schools and the rich schools because I work two-thirds time at Ridgetop and one-third time at some other schools, so I’ve worked at about ten different schools, and it’s something I can get very angry about— very angry about.

So right now, right this minute, right now, nine thirty at night, there are kids who are having home lives like Johnny Johnson did, like Eugene did, like Carlos did. They’re out on the street right now.

As a matter of fact, I know one who’s out on the street right now, probably, although he might wait a couple more hours and go out after his mom goes to work and leaves him at home with his little sister and his big brother. And, okay, this particular kid who goes to Ridgetop, and I can’t name him, he’s been roaming the streets at night. Now he hasn’t been doing anything bad, but he’s been out on the streets at night, so he gets to school in the morning and he’s exhausted, right, and C.P.S. can’t do anything about it because supposedly he’s not in imminent danger.

But he is in danger. I mean, you put a fifth grader out on the street at two o’clock in the morning, any fifth grader— they’re in danger.

It’s like, I’m sorry we can’t do anything for your mentally ill son. He hasn’t done anything violent yet. That kind of thing.

And that’s a whole other thing about the mental health system where Ann Richards closed down the state schools. So where do all the mentally ill people go? On the street.

So, why Texas? I’d say holdover from slavery days, and the mental health system, and the school system, but I don’t know that the school system is worse than anyplace else. I don’t know. Those are the only reasons I can think of. Can you think of others?

SOLIS: I’m sure I could.

JOANNA VAUGHN: Yeah.

SOLIS: Before I end—

JOANNA VAUGHN: Oh, I’m going to add one more thing.

SOLIS: Sure.

JOANNA VAUGHN: I think Texas— and there’s still this whole thing with Texas and Mexico, back to the racism. I mean it’s not just white versus Black, but white versus Mexican racism going on, also. But I know there are plenty of white people on death row, so, plenty of white people in prison, so it’s not just —

Poverty is a big part. I’m not just saying that no rich people go to prison or go to death row, but there are a whole lot more people who can’t afford lawyers, so, or can’t afford good lawyers.

SOLIS: Well first, I just want to thank you for giving us this interview. I’ve learned, as usual, I’ve learned a lot, and thank you. But before I end, I want to give Lydia the opportunity to ask any questions that she has.

CRAFTS: I’m okay. Thanks, yeah, yeah. Thank you.

SOLIS: Well, is there anything that I didn’t ask that you wish I would have asked, or is there anything that you would— we have about twelve minutes left on the tape. Is there anything that you would like to say that you think is important for the public record about the death penalty, about Johnny Johnson?

JOANNA VAUGHN: Well, I think that he had valuable understandings to contribute and share, and that— Would it have made more sense to put him in prison for life? I don’t know. I don’t know, but clearly, in the thirteen years he’d been there, he had changed, grown.

Some people, they just go crazy. I mean, you lock them up and they’re not in great shape to start with and they just get worse.

Eugene wrote recently, ‘cause he’s on level two, he said, “There’s some disgusting shit that goes on here. I don’t know how I manage to keep sane, but I’m getting used to being gassed everyday, because that’s one way that they have of dealing with the disgusting shit that goes on.”

I feel like all these guys that I know, and granted, it’s a group of only four people, they all have grown and matured spiritually while they’ve been incarcerated. Probably the correspondence between us has been a factor in that, in that it helps to have a human being recognize your humanity. If you get letters, than you get with the letters the message that you’re worth something. I’m not saying that I’m the only person that has contributed that way, by any means, but that it’s a contributing factor. So, I feel like it’s really tragic to kill off people. Doesn’t make any sense to me. Just doesn’t make any sense.

So, but what’s the other option? Well, life in prison.

Well, that’s what [one of my pen pals/name withheld for present] is hoping for. He figures that since he got that stay, that maybe— Everyday is a gift and maybe God has some purpose for him on the planet and he’s just trying to be as helpful as he can.

[My other pen pal] likewise. He’s trying to be as helpful as he can to the people in his family. He said— He’s got this niece and he gives her what-for because she’s definitely going astray. He tries to give his son and his stepson good advice ‘cause he knows, if they go astray, he knows just where they’re going and there’s nothing here for anybody, he says.

But he said he’s glad he got locked up because it gave him time to think. It made him think. He said, “If I hadn’t gotten locked up, I’d still be out there doing what I was doing before because I would never have slowed down enough to stop and think.”

So, I don’t know if I answered your question, but I don’t think it makes sense to kill people, even if they’re like— Okay they’re down there on level two, level three throwing feces at the warden or whoever. Obviously, they’re completely loony. They need help. They don’t need to be killed. They needed help before.

So I think that prison reform is definitely something that we need. Not just a moratorium or an ending of the death penalty, but prison reform in general, ‘cause they’re human beings, and as long as people are alive, it seems like there’s a hope that they can find a better self, of whatever. But you have to have some kind of an environment and some kind of program where that’s going to be possible, ‘cause they wouldn’t be there if horrible things hadn’t happened. So, that’s it.

SOLIS: Thank you.

CRAFTS: Yeah, thank you.

JOANNA VAUGHN: You’re welcome.