Roger Keith Coleman III: The Girlfriend
Here we were: Producers without an office on a studio lot, no secretary to answer our phone (singular), and some hastily-made business cards from Kwik-Print. There is no worse feeling in Hollywood than competing for attention when your personal pull is equivalent to that of a gnat. However, gnats have an important job in this town - swarms of them fill in all the spaces between the movements of the Big Players and this roster can change from moment to moment which is why the gnats keep at it. Aside from the eternal optimism that's mandatory for this job, we are also the masters of schadenfreude, taking perverse pleasure in the inevitable downturn of any number of careers in the normal course of events (we are, after all, the champions of passing fads). One person's blowout is another's opening into the fast lane.
For as long as the ride goes.....
Anyway, back to the story at hand: In 1992 Roger Keith Coleman, convicted rapist and murder, was languishing on death row....but wait, not really languishing. He was doing more interviews than Bono, making the cover of various magazines, including Time, guest-spotting on Larry King Live (remotely of course), and talking to as many journalists as his busy schedule would allow. And in between, writing earnestly in his homespun diary.
When I was eventually given access to these papers, I liked what I read. In his sad, patient recollections of an ordinary life before prison, and his belief in the inherent goodness of people, he was sincere and guileless. He seemed genuine and down-to earth, more like a stray leaf being carried down a fast-moving river than a man with darkness in his soul. And reading through the pages and pages of a man's life when you know the electric chair is waiting at the end is as intimate as it gets. It was as if he were trying to make up for the loss of his future by memorializing the minutia of his past into something that could never be destroyed. And through it all, despite a few nagging inconsistencies that we all ignored, his innocence rang true.
Part of this was a sense of inevitability about the whole thing that made you want to dig deeper and feel a bit of the soil in his real life. His childhood and young marriage in small-town Grundy, deep in the mining culture of rural Virginia, appeared to have gradually become tangled up in the legendary (and onetime bitter) relationship between the Hatfields and the McCoys. He had married into the McCoy family (the victim, Wanda McCoy was his sister-in-law) and shortly before the murder he was identified by Pat Hatfield as the man who had jacked off in front of her while she was working alone one night at the town library. It could be that every other resident of Grundy was related to one or the other family but it certainly made for good storytelling in the press. Coleman hated to be reminded of the indecent exposure charge because he said he'd been mis-identified and the case had never been prosecuted anyway (the DA said it was because he focused on the murder case instead). To talk with him , he seemed a bit dazed about the way his life had been pre-empted by a dark fate, one that he fervently believed was not his own.
And many people agreed with him. Besides his Washington lawyers, Arnold & Porter, he had the attention of investigator, Jim McCloskey, who started Centurion MInistries in Princeton to help overturn wrongful convictions, and until this year believed wholeheartedly in Coleman's innocence. He'd even saved a vial of DNA for the time when better testing would clear him posthumously.
There was another red herring: A woman had come forward after the trial to tell authorities that a man had tried to rape her and had confessed to McCoy's murder. But in a deepening mystery she was found dead the day after she went to the press. And nothing had been done to investigate this strange series of events.
But now you may ask, how was it that we got the diary referred to earlier? By chance and happenstance, and a little luck. When phone calls to Coleman's attorney's met with a polite "get in line" response, I decided to dig around on my own and look for another way in. The opportunity came in the form of a conversation with someone who'd been mentioned in one of the articles I'd read, a young woman who'd been Coleman's prison correspondant and confident for several years.
Sharon Paul was a shy, sweet, and trusting girl. Her number was listed in the phone book so I called her one early evening after she'd returned home from work. When she picked up I said as quickly as I could that I didn't want to bother her but that I just wanted to let her know how much I empathized with her situaton and how frustrated she must feel not being able to do more than she was.
Maybe when you've just come from living in the cold-water remains of your once grand marriage that speaks softly to another floundering soul but she didn't hang up on me. We talked for about an hour, mostly about my trip to the far north where I'd lived with a group of native Canadians who were suffering from cultural genocide and the degrading effects of mass alcoholism. I had been bounced from a relationship up there too and before long we were commiserating on the injustices of life and the loss of good people from an intrinsically evil world.
Sharon it turned out was more than just a pen-pal. They were in love, they wanted to be married, and it was agonizing for her to see him in such pain. She was the person who told me about the diaries first. "He's a good person," she told me softly. "His letters told me that and then I really got to know him. You can see how hard it is to live with these accusations when you read his story." When I told her that I hadn't actually been able to reach his lawyers, let alone get a meeting, she thought for a moment and said, "Call Kitty and let her know that I'll come down to meet you if you can make it to Washington."
Let's hear it for girl power!
Next: Dig deeper and black and white become shades of gray.
For as long as the ride goes.....
Anyway, back to the story at hand: In 1992 Roger Keith Coleman, convicted rapist and murder, was languishing on death row....but wait, not really languishing. He was doing more interviews than Bono, making the cover of various magazines, including Time, guest-spotting on Larry King Live (remotely of course), and talking to as many journalists as his busy schedule would allow. And in between, writing earnestly in his homespun diary.
When I was eventually given access to these papers, I liked what I read. In his sad, patient recollections of an ordinary life before prison, and his belief in the inherent goodness of people, he was sincere and guileless. He seemed genuine and down-to earth, more like a stray leaf being carried down a fast-moving river than a man with darkness in his soul. And reading through the pages and pages of a man's life when you know the electric chair is waiting at the end is as intimate as it gets. It was as if he were trying to make up for the loss of his future by memorializing the minutia of his past into something that could never be destroyed. And through it all, despite a few nagging inconsistencies that we all ignored, his innocence rang true.
Part of this was a sense of inevitability about the whole thing that made you want to dig deeper and feel a bit of the soil in his real life. His childhood and young marriage in small-town Grundy, deep in the mining culture of rural Virginia, appeared to have gradually become tangled up in the legendary (and onetime bitter) relationship between the Hatfields and the McCoys. He had married into the McCoy family (the victim, Wanda McCoy was his sister-in-law) and shortly before the murder he was identified by Pat Hatfield as the man who had jacked off in front of her while she was working alone one night at the town library. It could be that every other resident of Grundy was related to one or the other family but it certainly made for good storytelling in the press. Coleman hated to be reminded of the indecent exposure charge because he said he'd been mis-identified and the case had never been prosecuted anyway (the DA said it was because he focused on the murder case instead). To talk with him , he seemed a bit dazed about the way his life had been pre-empted by a dark fate, one that he fervently believed was not his own.
And many people agreed with him. Besides his Washington lawyers, Arnold & Porter, he had the attention of investigator, Jim McCloskey, who started Centurion MInistries in Princeton to help overturn wrongful convictions, and until this year believed wholeheartedly in Coleman's innocence. He'd even saved a vial of DNA for the time when better testing would clear him posthumously.
There was another red herring: A woman had come forward after the trial to tell authorities that a man had tried to rape her and had confessed to McCoy's murder. But in a deepening mystery she was found dead the day after she went to the press. And nothing had been done to investigate this strange series of events.
But now you may ask, how was it that we got the diary referred to earlier? By chance and happenstance, and a little luck. When phone calls to Coleman's attorney's met with a polite "get in line" response, I decided to dig around on my own and look for another way in. The opportunity came in the form of a conversation with someone who'd been mentioned in one of the articles I'd read, a young woman who'd been Coleman's prison correspondant and confident for several years.
Sharon Paul was a shy, sweet, and trusting girl. Her number was listed in the phone book so I called her one early evening after she'd returned home from work. When she picked up I said as quickly as I could that I didn't want to bother her but that I just wanted to let her know how much I empathized with her situaton and how frustrated she must feel not being able to do more than she was.
Maybe when you've just come from living in the cold-water remains of your once grand marriage that speaks softly to another floundering soul but she didn't hang up on me. We talked for about an hour, mostly about my trip to the far north where I'd lived with a group of native Canadians who were suffering from cultural genocide and the degrading effects of mass alcoholism. I had been bounced from a relationship up there too and before long we were commiserating on the injustices of life and the loss of good people from an intrinsically evil world.
Sharon it turned out was more than just a pen-pal. They were in love, they wanted to be married, and it was agonizing for her to see him in such pain. She was the person who told me about the diaries first. "He's a good person," she told me softly. "His letters told me that and then I really got to know him. You can see how hard it is to live with these accusations when you read his story." When I told her that I hadn't actually been able to reach his lawyers, let alone get a meeting, she thought for a moment and said, "Call Kitty and let her know that I'll come down to meet you if you can make it to Washington."
Let's hear it for girl power!
Next: Dig deeper and black and white become shades of gray.
posted by vallie at 11:10 AM
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