In December 2009, Matthew Eric Wrinkles became the last man executed at Indiana State Prison, a maximum-security facility about an hour’s drive south of Chicago that holds nearly 1,900 inmates, most serving long sentences for violent crimes. Wrinkles had spent fourteen years on death row after a jury convicted him of murdering his wife and two of her relatives inside their Evansville home in 1994, a crime committed while he wore camouflage and face paint. On the night of December 11, he was led into the death chamber, strapped down, and given a lethal injection, with a small group of protesters gathered outside the prison walls. He had not appealed or asked for clemency.
Superintendent Bill Wilson, who presided over that execution, later described the role with unsettling calm. His job, as he put it, was a single event: to put a man to death. In his experience, most condemned men accepted their fate quietly in the final hours. Some watched television.
Others sat in silence. One offender, during Wilson’s first execution, turned to the staff and apologized for putting them in that position. Only once had a prisoner resisted, refusing to move and having to be carried onto the execution bed. Another, passive and uncooperative, was simply lifted from the holding cell.
After the condemned man was secured, the death warrant was read, he was allowed a final statement, and the process began. That process is why Frederick Bear, a man on death row who had already spent seven years there, knew exactly what awaited him. Bear had been convicted of killing a mother and her young daughter in February 2004, a crime that still provoked revulsion among even the other murderers in the prison. He had talked his way into a house by pretending to be lost and asking to use the phone.
When a small child answered the door, he asked for the mother. His stated intention that day, as he later admitted, was to rape her while suffering from methamphetamine withdrawal. But he could not go through with it, and by then, he said, he had already gone too far. He knew he was headed back to prison, and he thought that if he killed them, no one would ever know.
He cut both their throats. The mother was twenty-four years old. Her name was Corey. The daughter was four.
Her name was Jenna. Bear remembered their names, marked their birthdays on his calendar, and said he still woke up in cold sweats thinking about what he had done to the little girl. Bear was one of twelve men on death row at Indiana State Prison, held in their cells for twenty-three hours a day with a single hour of recreation. During that hour, he exercised in the small space in front of his cell, wrote letters to his girlfriend in Germany, and cared for his cat, which he kept as a companion.
He was at stage thirteen of the sixteen levels of death row appeals, and he acknowledged that time was running out. He did not sugarcoat it: most of the men on the row would likely be executed or die as their appeals ran out. He admitted, openly and without hesitation, that he deserved to be executed under the laws of Indiana. The death penalty, he said, was put in place for people who did what he had done.
Bear’s relationship with Superintendent Wilson was unusual given what Wilson would ultimately be required to do. The two men spoke regularly during Wilson’s weekly visits to death row, discussing life, why they were both there, and how their paths had become intertwined. Wilson said he had come to grips with his role by consulting his religious leaders and asking God for forgiveness for his inability to fully understand his own purpose. Bear respected Wilson as a fair man who listened and understood, but he insisted it was not Wilson taking his life.
It was the state of Indiana. For his part, Bear accepted that he had put himself on the path that made him responsible for Wilson’s grim duty. As much as he loved his cat, he said, he would give her up to undo what he had done. Beyond death row, the prison contained hundreds of men serving life sentences or decades-long terms, most of them convicted murderers.
Lieutenant Gillespie walked through cell house C, the largest block, which held nearly 400 offenders. Here, trust had its small privileges. One prisoner, a man named Slayer, had been allowed to keep a cat through the prison’s pet program, a privilege based on conduct. He had requested a male cat, bought supplies, and named it Rascal, only to discover a month later that he had been given a female.
The name stuck anyway. Rascal, he said, helped him get through the bad days and treated her like a child. Slayer had been in prison for twenty-four years and would not be released until 2040, when he would be seventy-two. The worst part, he said, was losing the family he loved.
His mother had died a few years earlier, and he kept her photo on his wall, the first thing he saw each morning. He had a picture she had sent him of a cross, with a note on the back asking him to put it where he could always see it. Lieutenant Gillespie said the hardest part of his job was watching young offenders come to terms with the truth that they would never leave. Some embraced that reality and continued living as best they could.
Others, especially the young ones, took one to five years, sometimes up to eight, to fully realize they would spend the rest of their lives in the Department of Corrections. When that realization hit, some gave up entirely. Suicides, he said, were predominantly among those who realized there was no more hope. A measure of normality existed in the prison barbershop, which operated for six days a week and was staffed by some of the most trusted inmates.
John Sawatka, serving life without possibility of release, worked there cutting hair. He was calm and matter-of-fact about where he had ended up. His only prior trouble had been a misdemeanor marijuana charge. Then, he explained, he committed one murder and took the lives of two innocent people.
A man he had grown up with, someone he believed to be a big-time criminal, presented photographs of Sawatka’s mother, father, and brother, and told him that just as easily as those pictures had been taken, his family could be killed. Panic and fear for his family took over. He was offered around seven or eight hundred dollars to carry out a contract killing, money he could barely remember. He killed two people he did not know, stabbing them to death, because he was terrified and because it never crossed his mind to go to the police.
He accepted his guilt without excuse. During Trevor McDonald’s two weeks inside the prison, violence interrupted the routine. An inmate in cell house C was badly beaten during the day. The victim was found motionless in his cell when guards forced the door open.
The light in his cell had been switched off, a deliberate attempt to hide the attack. The man was still alive but seriously injured. Lieutenant Gillespie, who found him, thought he was dead at first. After the attack, the entire block was locked down, with prisoners confined to their cells for twenty-four hours a day.
Some saw this as collective punishment. Dennis Lair, serving a sentence that would keep him behind bars for more than fifty years, described how lockdowns cut men off from their families with no way to warn visitors not to come. He recalled stretches in the early 1990s when the prison was locked down for eleven months straight. During those times, he said, a man had to find something to keep himself occupied or he might go crazy.
Some did. He counte himself lucky to have his television, his guitar, and his cat, even though Rascal, confined to the cell with him, wanted out onto the range as much as he did. As his time in the prison came to an end, McDonald returned to death row for a final meeting with Frederick Bear. Asked about his life, Bear described a childhood that was normal at first, adoption by a good man who loved him, and a life that fell apart after his sister passed away.
He started stealing as a child, began with Matchbox cars in kindergarten, and never stopped. He called himself a thief and said he had given up after his sister’s death, losing the will to care. His route to death row was a burglary that became murder. He had planned to rape the mother, could not go through with it, and killed both the mother and the four-year-old daughter to cover what he had already done.
He said he still carried their names with him, that they had become part of his life, and that he woke up from nightmares about the little girl whose life he had stopped at its beginning. McDonald, who had always opposed the death penalty, told Bear that listening to him explain his crime made him begin to understand why people believed execution was the appropriate sentence. Bear agreed without hesitation. He deserved to be executed.
He had no illusions about it and did not try to soften the truth. The death penalty existed for people who had done what he had done. McDonald eventually left Indiana State Prison and the 1,900 men held there, but he said the memory of what he had seen and heard would stay with him for the rest of his life.
Frederick Bear remained in his cell on death row, waiting for the day when the state of Indiana would set the date on which Superintendent Wilson would be required to end his life the same way he had ended Matthew Eric Wrinkles’s.