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Post by Rev. Agave on May 2, 2009 20:09:49 GMT -6
www.houstonpress.com/1995-04-06/news/down-on-peckerwood-hill/2Down on Peckerwood Hill
It's the last stop for some Texas prison inmates
By Steve McVicker
Published on April 06, 1995
At times it must seem that way, but not every convict released from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice comes to Houston. Some take up residence at a place formally known within the TDCJ as Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery but better known in Huntsville as "Peckerwood Hill" -- the final holding cell for more than 1,000 former involuntary guests of the state. Situated on a sloped patch of land thick with towering pine trees east of Sam Houston State University, Peckerwood Hill is the largest of the little-known series of prison cemeteries in the state.
Row after row of white cement crosses and headstones, made by inmates at the prison quarry, line the 22 acres. The oldest dates back to 1870. Some of the markers display only the prison identification number of inmates whose bodies were not claimed by friends or family. Others include both names and numbers. The letters EX distinguish prisoners who were executed from those who simply died or were killed while serving their sentences. A full-time squad of inmates from the nearby Walls Unit maintains the grounds and digs new graves by hand. It's a quiet setting, disturbed only by the sound of traffic at the adjacent convenience store and the spray from the car wash across the street.
Standing next to a fresh mound of red clay dirt excavated for a grave-to-be, Jack King, director of the Huntsville Funeral Home, explains that his mortuary has handled final arrangements for unclaimed inmates and those whose families can't afford a private burial for almost four decades. Since there are prisons across Texas, the price King charges the state varies, depending on how far a deceased inmate must be transported to Huntsville. Each inmate gets the same consideration. They are buried in their release clothes (a work shirt and khaki pants) inside a cloth-covered pine casket -- don't call it a "box," King admonishes -- that retails for $835. The model is on display in King's showroom and is available for purchase by the non-inmate public.
"These are Christian burials," King emphasizes. "The bodies are prepared just like in the free world. Even when we do four in a day, it's not a mass [burial] deal. We put them in a funeral coach. We don't bring them out here in a pickup truck. They're brought out and properly buried."
Services are performed by prison chaplains of various faiths. Occasionally the TDCJ allows other inmates to go to the funerals of friends. Family and friends from outside the prison system occasionally show up for a graveside service. Usually the proceedings are routine. But not always.
"We had a witch out here the other day," King says dryly. "It was just kind of a different service. They used a lot of salt in it. The chaplain and the warden just said, 'We're going to have our service then y'all can have your service.' So, they had their service and they salted him down."
Inmates who've died of AIDS-related diseases have increased the number of taxpayer-funded interments in recent years. The state's resumption of executions in 1982 also has brought more business King's way. Of the 92 inmates who've had their death sentences carried out in the last 13 years, 21 are at perpetual rest on Peckerwood Hill.
One of those burials is especially memorable to King -- not for the service but for what happened later. A few weeks after that 1984 execution and burial, King says, reporters showed up at Huntsville Funeral Home with information that a woman who had befriended the late death row inmate while he was in prison was going to the cemetery to have a birthday party for him.
"She went out there," recalls King, "and spread a big blanket and had her a birthday cake and her jambox. And the two of them had a big birthday party for him. Her and him. He didn't say much, though. And he didn't eat no cake."
TDCJ officials and historians are unable to say for sure how the cemetery came to be known as Peckerwood Hill. But it's not hard to figure. According to Webster's (and as many East Texans can vouch), "peckerwood" is term used to describe "a rural white Southerner -- often used disparagingly." But the one historical figure of note who was buried at Peckerwood Hill didn't quite fit that demographic category.
Under one of the larger pine trees in the cemetery is a special marker designating the spot where the body of Kiowa chief Satanta was once buried. Satanta, also known as White Bear, was one of the signers of the Medicine Lodge Treaty, in which the chiefs of the Southern Plains tribes agreed to limit where their people could live and hunt and, in effect, gave up their nomadic lives and were forced onto reservations. Satanta was captured in 1871 and convicted of murder for a wagon train massacre on Salt Creek Prairie in Jack County. According to prison archivist Bob Pierce, Satanta's death sentence was commuted to life.
"They decided that wouldn't do anything because Indians think death is a sign of honor," says Pierce, "and what would hurt the Indian more than killing him was putting him in prison." Satanta eventually committed suicide by flinging himself through a second-floor window of a prison hospital onto a brick courtyard. In 1963, with the approval of then-Governor John Connally, members of the Kiowa tribe were allowed to exhume Satanta's grave, and his remains were reburied on the Kiowa reservation in Oklahoma. Satanta's relatives performed a purification ritual and continue to consider the original gravesite at Peckerwood Hill as sacred ground.It was also in 1963 that prison officials decided to reclaim the neglected Peckerwood Hill in hopes of making it aesthetically pleasing, if not sacred. For years the "felons' field," although still used for burials, had not been maintained. But with the approval of prison system director George Beto, Captain Joe Byrd, the assistant warden at the Walls Unit, used inmate labor to restore the cemetery. When the cleanup was complete, it was determined that the cemetery contained the graves of 922 convicts -- 918 men and 4 women. Prison officials say they have no record of how many inmates have been buried there since then.
According to Byrd's grandson, Jay Byrd, himself now the warden of the Clemens Unit near Brazoria, Captain Byrd was a big, intimidating man who had a love of flowers. Byrd says his grandfather took special pride in the restoration of the inmate graveyard, which would come to bear his name after his own death.
"It represented him as a decent human being," says Byrd. "He believed people should be punished for what they did. But no matter what a person did on earth, he always believed that we should give them the same respect as anyone else when they die."
With the prison business booming in Texas, it's likely that many more taxpayer-funded last respects will be paid on Peckerwood Hill. In fact, the TDCJ has just cleared a section of pine trees on the cemetery grounds to accommodate more pine boxes.
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Post by Rev. Agave on May 2, 2009 20:14:33 GMT -6
www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/peckerwood_hill__an_artifact_of_the_death_penalty_06-24-2008_16_22_10.htmlPeckerwood Hill: An artifact of the death penalty By RON FRANSCELL March, 31, 2008
HUNTSVILLE - A shroud of low, ashen mist swathes Peckerwood Hill on a corpse-cold day in Texas.
No matter. The Rev. Carroll Pickett knows the spot he seeks. The ground is spongy with night rain, sunken in some places where cheap pine-box coffins have rotted and collapsed, so he walks respectfully among the dead. A plastic grocery sack flutters in the highest branches of a yellow pine, a ghost guard keeping watch over almost 3,000 dead, indigent criminals Texas has buried here for the last 160 years.
The history of the American death penalty is written across the handmade concrete headstones on Peckerwood Hill, Texas' biggest and oldest prison cemetery. It is as much an artifact of capital punishment as "Old Sparky," the Texas electric chair, now a museum piece.
More condemned men - 180 - are buried here than 29 other states have executed in their entire history. Most share the ignominy of a nameless tombstone marked only with their inmate number, a death date and a simple "X" ... executed.
This spring, the U.S. Supreme Court likely will deliver its latest opinion about the constitutionality of lethal injection - an execution method first used in Texas in 1982. The justices' ruling could affirm or adjust America's preferred death mechanism, or shake the institution of capital punishment to its core for the second time in the last 40 years.
The dead on Peckerwood Hill are past caring. This place smells and feels different from other graveyards. It's dark and sour, as if bad men decay into bad earth. Not all were executed, but all were criminals doing time. The memories here aren't happy, and few mourners leave flowers, much less celebrate wasted lives.
And Peckerwood Hill is little more than a 22-acre potter's field, since these dead prisoners had neither money nor family willing to claim their corpses.
Pickett stops. As Texas' death house chaplain between 1982 and 1997, he escorted 95 men the last eight paces to their executions. The mildewed cross at his muddy feet is stamped, simply and coldly, "3-14-84 X 670."
Pickett stood on this spot 24 years ago and conducted a secret funeral for Inmate #670 - J.D. Autry, a 29-year-old kid who shot a Port Arthur convenience store clerk in 1980 for a six-pack of beer. Autry's was only the second execution he'd attended.
"They called him Cowboy and he was my friend," the white-haired, 78-year-old Pickett said, kneeling to brush dry leaves from a small plaque someone later placed at Autry's grave. "His time came and he was strapped in a little after 11. We were in that room together, just me and him, nobody else, for almost an hour. Then he got a stay just before midnight. He spent all that time strapped down, waiting to die. Then he didn't."
Back on death row, the resurrected Autry became a hero of mythic proportion. He'd gone where nobody else had ever gone, into the death chamber, and lived to tell about it. Five months later, he walked the last mile with Pickett for a second time and didn't come back.
After Autry, Pickett buried 20 more executed men on Peckerwood Hill (which the now-retired Presbyterian minister prefers to call by its proper name, Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery, for the assistant warden who personally cleaned up the overgrown boneyard and located hundreds of unmarked graves in the 1960s. But "Peckerwood Hill" - a reference to poor Southern trash - is what prisoners have called it for the last 100 years.)
"To walk out here is to know these people had two or three deaths," Pickett said. "Going to prison is like dying, but when their bodies finally die, they're here all alone."
Pickett remembers all of them. He can tell you something about each one. He carries a Bible and a log of their deaths. He can tell you what they ate, their last words and how they faced death at the end. As he walks down the line of gray stones, he pauses before the intermittent ones marked with the telltale "X."
"Here's Jay Kelly Pinkerton," Pickett said. "I think he was about 17 when he raped and stabbed a 70-year-old nun. In those moments before he died (on May 15, 1986), I asked him why. He told me, 'I just wanted to know what it was like.'"
A burial ground by accident Peckerwood Hill was an unused patch of private land when the new Texas prison in Huntsville mistakenly began using it as a burial ground in 1853. A couple of years later, the landowners deeded it to the State of Texas, reckoning a boneyard for scoundrels wasn't much use for anything else.
No burial records were ever kept, but photos of Peckerwood Hill in 1899 show many graves, all marked with wooden crosses, according to Jim Willett, the former prison warden who now runs the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville. When it comes to death and prison, Willet is an indisputable expert: In three years as warden between 1998 and 2001, he witnessed 89 executions, more than any warden in American history.
Over its first hundred years, Peckerwood Hill was little more than an untended trash heap, spiritually and physically. Nobody cared much. Weeds and brush engulfed it, hiding graves while time and the elements rotted their wooden crosses. When Capt. Joe Byrd organized the massive cleanup in the 1960s, he located 922 graves, although nobody knows exactly who's in 312 of them. Many more were lost forever.
"It's hard to believe they kept no records of who was buried here until 1974," Willett said recently. "They were burying people here for 120 years before anybody thought to write it down. I think there are about 260 people that we don't even know who they are."
Peckerwood Hill's most famous "resident" busted out long ago. Kiowa chief Satanta, who was imprisoned in 1874 for leading insurgent raids on Texas settlers and inspired the character Blue Duck in Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove," committed suicide by leaping from a prison window and was buried on Peckerwood Hill in 1878. In 1963, his grandson claimed his bones and reburied them in Fort Sill, Okla. A monument to Satanta remains.
Until 1923, executions were carried out by county sheriffs in Texas, usually by hanging. Then the State of Texas assumed the morbid duty and the electric chair became the official death mechanism.
Texas executed its first inmate by electrocution on Feb. 8, 1924 - followed quickly by four more within a few hours. Today, three of those five men are buried side-by-side on Peckerwood Hill, and Texas has executed a total of 911 inmates since 1923. Some 405 of those were executed by lethal injection before the U.S. Supreme Court decided to reconsider its constitutionality last month.
Now as then, a grave is hand-dug by inmates, sometimes before there's a dead man to fill it. Funerals always begin at 8:30 a.m., and there might be two or three in short order. The dead convict is buried in his release clothes, a work shirt and khaki pants. He is transported by a proper hearse, not a state pickup. Four inmates act as pallbearers, then bury the casket after the death house chaplain said a few words. Sometimes mourners come, sometimes they don't.
Another chapter of death-penalty history can be seen only by reading between the barely tidy lines of headstones. In 1964, Texas executions stopped while America wrestled with the humanity of death penalty, and they weren't resumed for almost 20 years. So visitors will find no X'd markers from the 1960s and '70s.
At midnight on Dec. 7, 1982, killer Charlie Brooks became the first American to die by lethal injection. That night, America got a new kind of death.
And that night, the Rev. Carroll Pickett said an earnest prayer and helped Brooks die a good death.
One man's long history Pickett has buried hundreds of men here. Not just a handful of executed killers, but small-time hoods with bad hearts, gangsters with AIDS, bed-sheet and razor-blade suicides, victims of shanks, cancer and old age.
Pickett looks down at the ground, or perhaps the flawed souls concealed there. The heavy air is colder now.
"Yes, I suppose they were bad," he said, "or at least did bad things. But I knew a man who stuffed a sausage down his son's throat and killed him. Later, he was active in the church and very generous. He changed. Some of them ... well, sometimes I've thought we might have been friends in a different situation at another time."
Pickett pauses at another grave. Here lies Donald Franklin, who viciously raped and murdered a San Antonio nurse. Before he was executed 13 years later, he told Pickett he reckoned he'd be reincarnated as a tree in Tyler, Texas. Then he died.
And a little further is the only condemned man who never talked to Pickett about his crimes, even at the end. In 1976, James Demouchette and his brother executed two Houston Pizza Hut workers so they could steal a bag of change and a stereo. Almost 16 years later, he had nothing to say in his last day on earth, no final words - except that he didn't want squash or okra with his final meal.
But some tell everything, secrets that they won't take to their grave. Other murders, rapes or inhumanities. Pickett carries those secrets with him now because a clergyman he cannot betray their confidence, even though the weight of knowing he might be able to salve a family's anguish is sometimes to heavy to bear.
His last stop before dark is Clifton Russell, one of two inmates executed on the same night in 1995. Pickett watched both of them die. Russell was first, simply because his inmate number was lower. The stultifying burden of ushering a man to his death, times two.
"I don't know if I can ever get over that," Pickett said, pulling his collar up against the wet wind.
A distant whistle blows at The Walls, the unit housing Texas' death chamber, named for its fortress-like parapets. A dog howls in response from the trailer park on the cemetery's southern edge.
"As I walk through these acres and acres of thousands and thousands of convicts, I am bothered emotionally, spiritually and morally," Pickett said on the way back to his car. "Many times, I have struggled with my feelings about this place."
That's not all Pickett has struggled with. The death house chaplain who escorted 95 men to whatever lay beyond for them, who walked the last eight paces with them and who listened to whatever they wanted to say before their last midnight, is now an outspoken opponent of the death penalty. His 2002 book, "Within These Walls," sketches his extraordinary path from a South Texas kid who believed in an eye for an eye to a gentle pastor who witnessed the reality of it, and came to abhor it.
But Peckerwood Hill is an eternity from Austin and Washington. There are no politics in a graveyard. The criminal dead here don't care anymore, even if their X'd headstones reflect America's conflict - or lack of it - about capital punishment over the last 100 years or so. And most of those who care, well, they don't end up on Peckerwood Hill.
"We all die somehow," Pickett said as he leaves. "A lot of these men were relieved to finally be done with it. If they believed in an afterlife, had any faith at all, this was freedom."
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Post by Rev. Agave on May 2, 2009 20:21:00 GMT -6
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Post by Deleted on May 2, 2009 22:00:35 GMT -6
its a very errie place.
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Post by Rev. Agave on May 2, 2009 22:44:16 GMT -6
If I ever get a chance to make it to Huntsville it will certainly be one of the places I would visit.
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Post by kingsindanger on May 3, 2009 0:12:06 GMT -6
Creepy.
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Post by The Tipsy Broker on May 3, 2009 2:35:51 GMT -6
Is this where they filmed Pet Semetery
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Post by Potassium_Pixie on May 3, 2009 23:23:35 GMT -6
It should also be a tourist attraction?
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Post by The Tipsy Broker on May 4, 2009 1:19:08 GMT -6
Didn't I read somewhere that theres a tourist shop near the death house (not IN the actual prison obviously) selling tee shirts and stuff with electric chairs on them? I wonder if they post overseas
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Post by Deleted on May 4, 2009 1:58:09 GMT -6
If I ever get a chance to make it to Huntsville it will certainly be one of the places I would visit. thats for sure,it would be very interesting to read the headstones, & one place i would visit as well is the prison museum to see old sparky & other paraphernalia..
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Post by Rev. Agave on May 4, 2009 2:11:03 GMT -6
If I ever get a chance to make it to Huntsville it will certainly be one of the places I would visit. & other paraphernalia.. They even have a display featuring the actual syringes and IV bag used in the first lethal injection.
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Post by Deleted on May 4, 2009 3:08:06 GMT -6
They even have a display featuring the actual syringes and IV bag used in the first lethal injection. Yeah thats right,I wondered who was the inmate they used them syringes on,see some of the shanks they have there,wow,thats some scary shyte.. www.txprisonmuseum.org/
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Post by The Tipsy Broker on May 4, 2009 3:14:30 GMT -6
Nice link, thanks Porky Wow nice wallets
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Post by Rev. Agave on May 4, 2009 3:14:35 GMT -6
They even have a display featuring the actual syringes and IV bag used in the first lethal injection. Yeah thats right,I wondered who was the inmate they used them syringes on,see some of the shanks they have there,wow,thats some scary shyte.. www.txprisonmuseum.org/The inmate's name was Charlie Brooks Jr. They juiced him real good back in the early 80s.
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Post by Deleted on May 4, 2009 3:23:53 GMT -6
Yeah thats right,I wondered who was the inmate they used them syringes on,see some of the shanks they have there,wow,thats some scary shyte.. www.txprisonmuseum.org/The inmate's name was Charlie Brooks Jr. They juiced him real good back in the early 80s. Oh ok..no worries
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Post by Deleted on May 4, 2009 3:27:42 GMT -6
Nice link, thanks Porky Wow nice wallets Not bad hay,I want one of the tdcj coffee mugs. ;D,& a marshall star key chain.. lol..
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Post by The Tipsy Broker on May 4, 2009 3:32:00 GMT -6
Nice link, thanks Porky Wow nice wallets Not bad hay,I want one of the tdcj coffee mugs. ;D,& a marshall star key chain.. lol.. And those baseball caps. I don't think they ship overseas tho too bad, they'd make a tidy profit from me ;D
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Post by Deleted on May 6, 2009 6:44:38 GMT -6
Porky,
If you head down to melbourne ensure you include a tour of the Old Melbourne gaol. I was rather impressed. They will give you a tour of the neighbouring Russell St Police station as well.
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Post by Potassium_Pixie on May 10, 2009 14:51:31 GMT -6
What I don't get is why did they build a new chamber? The old chamber was perfectly fine. And it was also where their electric chair was briefly. And it also had wheels on it.
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