![]() ![]() Though Larry was 38 years her senior, they had remained close because of the peculiar history they shared. It was Larry who had recruited her to TDCJ, and their friendship had continued after he retired and Michelle succeeded him as the agency’s director of public information. The authoritative sound of his voice-Larry had been a radio news reporter back in the sixties-had always reassured her. Michelle thought back to a few months earlier, when she had called her former boss, Larry Fitzgerald, on the way to work, as she did every now and then to check in on him. “I think about it all the time.”Īs she approached Houston’s outer suburbs, the East Texas pines receded, replaced by roadside billboards hawking vasectomy reversals and personal injury lawyers and Chick-fil-A. “I thought being away from the prison system would make me think about it less, but it’s been quite the opposite,” she continued. “There are men I watched die that I don’t think should have.” A piece of folk art she had picked up on a trip to Austin-an evil-eye charm to ward off bad spirits-bobbed from her rearview mirror. “But in other cases, I feel very conflicted,” she added. “I believe that there are some crimes that are so heinous that the only way you can truly pay your debt to society is with your life.” She spoke with the same deliberation she had used when addressing reporters outside the Walls after high-profile executions. “I support the death penalty,” she began. She kept one eye on the road that morning as she rummaged through her purse for her iPhone, finally fishing it out and holding the microphone up to her mouth. Instead, she had started recording voice memos, letting her thoughts unspool as she drove alone in the car. These memories intruded with such frequency that Michelle no longer tried to push them out of her mind. All told, she had seen 278 inmates put to death. Michelle spent many evenings-hundreds, in fact-standing shoulder-to-shoulder with witnesses in a cramped room that afforded a view of the death chamber, where she watched as men, and two women, were injected with a three-drug cocktail that stopped their hearts. ![]() She had also attended executions for her previous job, as a reporter covering prisons for the hometown newspaper, the Huntsville Item. Michelle’s office occupied a corner of an administrative building directly across the street from the Walls, and one of the requirements of her job as a public information officer had been to attend every execution the state carried out. The prison, whose ramparts measure more than thirty feet high, is a colossal, foreboding structure crowned by razor wire-a two-block-long, red-brick fortress that houses the most active death chamber in the country. When Michelle first went to work for TDCJ, in 2001, she had begun each weekday morning by driving into town, past the picturesque courthouse square and toward the Walls Unit, the 165-year-old penitentiary that is Huntsville’s most iconic landmark. “Have a beautiful day,” she murmured when her nine-year-old leaned in to kiss her goodbye. Though she had left the position two years earlier, she was still well-known around town, and several mothers waved as her car idled in the drop-off line. ![]() She had been the public face of the agency, a disarmingly friendly, upbeat spokesperson for the biggest prison system in the nation. Michelle, who sat behind the wheel of her blue Chevy sedan nursing a travel mug of coffee, had worked for TDCJ herself for more than a decade. Many parents who were dropping their children off at school that day worked for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Huntsville’s largest employer. Set deep in the Piney Woods, Huntsville-which is home to no fewer than five prisons-is a company town whose primary industry is confinement. Letter from death row inmate Robert Coulson, June 25, 2002Įarly one morning in April, Michelle Lyons pulled up outside her daughter’s elementary school in Huntsville, seventy miles north of Houston. I’m sorry we didn’t meet under different circumstances. ![]() I wanted to tell you that I enjoyed talking to you, you seem like a really great lady. Hi, if you are reading this then they killed me. ![]()
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