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Time.
This is the strangest one.
Do you know that the worst part
and yet the best part of being in solitary confinement
is time can be a blisteringly fast thing,
where in the blink of an eye, you can look,
and ten years are gone from your life,
but the next week is agony?
It’s like you look at your wristwatch
and instead of there being a face, there’s a calendar,
and it flips.
But then if you look out the window,
it takes all day for that sun to go down.
[exhales]
I always wanted to tell somebody that.
YARRIS: We got into the prison about 11:00 a.m.
They took all the other prisoners off this bus,
and then four men came on.
They lined me up against this red brick wall.
And here comes Lieutenant Warner.
He walked right up to me, right up to my face.
He was very quiet.
“There’s no speaking in my prison.
Dead men do not speak in my prison especially.
Do you understand me?”
Just like that. Same tone of voice.
Nothing raised, nothing threatening.
And that lured quietness.
I did. I went to answer. I was like...
Backhanded me right in the mouth.
It stung like you wouldn’t believe.
[prison gate closes]
Then I was thrown into this world where there’s no sunlight,
and it’s deadly silent.
The Pennsylvania prison system was developed by the Quakers.
The doors were cut low so you had to stoop and bow to go into them.
While you were in the cell, you were meant not to communicate.
It was part of your punishment.
It was eerie because out of almost 140 men at the time in “B” Block,
no one spoke.
You’d hear them cough, or urinate and flush the toilet,
but there was no real sound.
That was the worst for me.
Especially the first couple of months.
You still can hear your mother crying at the trial.
You can still smell the aftershave on the witnesses, man.
It’s just every little detail is just eating you alive
because you’ve just been put here.
The door was still ringing in your ears ’cause of the slam.
You’re just left there and you’re like-- [inhales]
Yet you don’t come to your door and talk to a neighbor
’cause if you broke the speaking rule,
you were struck or beaten by the guards.
In level five, you were allowed to exercise
in these dog kennel-like cages.
Nineteen feet long, ten feet wide.
You got an hour to exercise by yourself ’cause you’re a death-row prisoner.
But the guards, being pricks,
if you had a problem with another guy and they knew you were enemies,
they’d put you in the cage together
knowing that as soon as they’d walked off a few steps,
you two are gonna go at it.
If that didn’t work, they picked out two big guys and put them in together.
And had some fun.
Usually it was a white guy with a black guy,
Spanish guy with a black guy,
Spanish guy with a white guy.
“Gladiatoring,” they called it.
[metal squeaking, water running]
The shower was the most vulnerable time.
If you’re gonna get somebody, that’s the place to get them.
You got access to them, there’s no handcuffs, and they’re naked.
I had only been there a few days and I walked into the shower.
Just as I turned the corner, there was a Puerto Rican boy,
and he had sharpened the pork chop bone
and then stabbed this man in the back of the liver with it.
The guy started flopping, and then they just cut all the water off
and just beat all six of us senseless and drug us back out of the shower.
Then they served food.
They got everything cleaned up and began serving lunch.
It went on as a routine day.
[men chattering]
Two guys were arguing ’cause one guy didn’t get enough bread on his tray.
I’m like, “This is crazy.
You’re so whacked out of your mind that you’re gonna call to the guard,
‘Hey, man, I only got one slice of bread on my tray,’
when a human being just died.”
I lived in silence for two whole years.
The first two years.
That’s when the drugs were discovered in the choir room,
and everything changed.
These prisoners from the choir were locked up with us
in empty cells on death row.
Because none of them were going to tell where the drugs came from,
they were going to ship all of them to individual different prisons.
To the other eight members of the choir, it really didn’t matter.
But two of the men had a bond that was special.
Wesley and Butch.
Wesley was this fair-skinned, green-eyed, beautiful black guy
who just exuded this eloquence and sweetness about him.
Everyone liked him.
He had a voice that was gravelly and wondrous.
He had met Butch when they were children at a church in West Philadelphia
where Butch was a foster child.
Obviously, Wesley was gay,
and they formed this bond that seemed to be invulnerable.
And then,
Butch began stealing and getting in trouble.
He was arrested and thrown into county prison in Philadelphia.
Wesley went nuts without him.
He was the only thing in his life that protected him
from the scorn of his parents, the bullies in the neighborhood,
the people who knew he was weak without Butch.
So he began committing deliberate crimes and getting arrested
so that he could be with Butch.
They found out prison is the one place they could be normal.
They got themselves put into the same cell
and, together in the setting of a prison,
where homosexuality is an accepted form of expression
or just life,
no one bothered them.
That’s when the drugs were discovered, and the guard on duty at nine o’clock
started tormenting Wesley,
“Hey, faggot, you’re going! Your boy’s going to Western.
I just looked on the transfer sheet.
You’re going to Dallas, opposite ends of the state of Pennsylvania.
Bye, nigger!”
I guess Wesley went crazy in that cell.
’Cause about 40 minutes later, just before ten o’clock,
there was like 20 minutes left before shift change at 10:00 p.m.,
this voice took over.
♪♪ [falsetto voice vocalizing]
MAN: ♪ Oh, yeah, I have dreamed the dream ♪
♪ Of every common man ♪
Every man on that block just stood still.
♪ I have sworn by my blood as your man, my love ♪
We knew the penalty.
♪ That one day, I promise one day all of your hurting would stop ♪
Then you heard the keys. [clicking sound]
Footsteps behind it.
“What the fuck are you doing, singing in my block? I will beat your head in.
If you don’t stop that singing right now, I will beat your head in!”
♪ But, oh ♪
♪ Thanks to you, baby ♪
[laughing]
♪ For just loving a common man ♪
More keys.
♪ I want to thank you this evening, honey ♪
[clicking] Here they come.
Everybody knows what’s coming.
♪ I thought that I’d failed you ♪
The lieutenant came running down, and he was this militant asshole
with the brush cut and the uniform that was pressed to precision.
He ran down and he ran down and he said, “Hold it,” like that.
And even Wesley stopped.
’Cause we know when Lieutenant Norris raised his hand, that was it.
He said, “I leave in 20 minutes.
If there is a noise on this block from anyone
when I leave this unit,
we will beat every man’s head in, do you understand me?”
Silence.
“Finish that song, inmate. Let’s go.”
The guards looked at him like he had lost his friggin’ mind.
They were stunned.
“Let’s go. You! You got 20 minutes.”
And walked off the block.
[clicking]
They even had an argument on their way out the door.
-When the gates shut... -[gate door slams]
...that big, wide “B” Block gate,
when they left the block alone,
we were like, “Oh, my God.
We are totally and utterly unsupervised.”
He came back, right in mid-lyric, like he had never stopped singing.
♪ He said I love you, baby ♪
♪ I love you for just being a common man ♪
♪♪ [vocalizing]
You hear them. Here they go.
The other members that had a little bit of guts
were blowing, you know?
They were giving bass, and it was wonderful, these voices, yeah?
♪ I thank you, baby ♪
♪ Yeah, for respecting me, yeah ♪
-♪ I want to thank you, baby ♪ -♪♪ [voices harmonizing]
♪ For every time you love me ♪
♪ I want to thank you for respecting me ♪
♪ Every time we meet ♪
♪ Thank you for calming my troubles ♪
-♪♪ [vocalizing continues] -[fingers snapping]
[fingers continue snapping]
Then out of nowhere...
♪ Ooh ♪
...we heard this woman’s voice.
Dorothy Moore’s “Misty Blue.”
♪ Ahh ♪
I thought, I swear to God,
somebody had gotten a radio in on “B” Block.
♪♪ [vocalizing]
♪ Looks like I’d get you off my mind ♪
No one really knew who it was that was singing.
Then I figured it out.
Butch was 6’4”
and 240 pounds.
He had a big jagged scar that ran down the side of his face,
like from someone trying to cut his head open.
I was terrified of this man.
♪ Ah ♪
♪ Just the mention of your name ♪
To hear him sing in this beautiful voice...
♪ Turns the flicker to a flame ♪
...as his way of showing love for someone
who was being taken from him the next morning,
made me want someone to care for me in that place so much
that they would sing
knowing that singing would have gotten their head beat in.
♪ Misty blue ♪
[Yarris inhales, exhales deeply]
They shipped Wesley that morning at 3:55 a.m.,
but the next day,
a few guys were talking outside of their cells to each other,
like a normal conversation, and when the guard went by?
He didn’t tell them they was gonna beat their brains in.
He just simply said, “Keep that down. The lieutenant doesn’t like it.”
They weren’t going to torture us with silence anymore.
[keys jangling, gate door opens]
[buzzer sounds]
Joe Bullen, my first appellate attorney,
God bless him,
got the attention of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
He didn’t like me, but he filed the appeal nonetheless
and got us the hearing scheduled for February 20.
I was excited to go to court, you know.
Two Delaware County sheriffs were waiting for me.
They come up. They put the handcuffs on me.
Both men were in their 60s.
Two sweetheart guys were already bullshitting
about basketball and football and all this stuff into Philadelphia.
They’re giving me updates on things that I haven’t caught up on
and people back down in the county jail, who’s going up to the state prison.
We’re talking about how damn cold it is.
It was bitterly cold.
In fact, it was the coldest day of the year that year.
[turn signal clicking]
I’m sitting in the back, and we’re driving along.
We get down there four and a half hours later.
It’s now about 4:30, almost 5:00 p.m. and nearly pitch dark.
We pull in to go to the bathroom.
The driver drives past it by, like, 25 yards.
We get out of the car and we’re hit with that blast of cold.
We run right over, the three of us, to the cubicle,
and I go in, and the door’s being held open by the taller officer.
He stands there while I urinate and watches me.
I’m peeing, minding my own business.
I’m thinking about getting back in that warm-ass car.
It’s freezing. I turn, I look up.
He’s got his hand up. I put my head under his arm.
I make the left turn to go back to the car.
What I did not know is that the officer who was driving
went back to the car and waited.
I came out of the cubicle and started trotting towards him.
He looked past me, and he didn’t see his partner.
He doesn’t know if I’ve killed his partner or not.
He just knew he was seeing a death-row prisoner
running at him unescorted.
That’s when he pulled his gun.
When he did that motion of sticking his hand on his hip
and pulling the weapon from the holster,
I just turned and started running.
He fired that weapon, and it was like this huge percussion.
[gunshot]
At 2,700 feet per second,
that bullet went past my ear,
and so did anything else that I was looking behind me for.
I went down and I hit the ground and ripped all the skin on my hands,
and it just like, ooh!
It started this attitude, you know.
That’s it. I’m gonna do what I gotta do.
So I just got up and I ran towards the big plate glass window
of the restaurant next door.
I figured if I’m running directly at the window, he can’t shoot me.
I ran about a hundred yards across the road
and I circled back,
and I came right back to where I had escaped.
Now I’m lookin’ at them as they’re yelling at each other
who was the bigger idiot for letting this happen.
-Then I hear them. -[sirens wailing]
All the sirens in the world are coming.
There was cars coming from everywhere.
[sirens continue]
They had an escaped death-row prisoner alert.
They pulled out all the stops.
So I took my eyeglasses off,
pulled the plastic off the end of the eyeglasses
and I stuck the eyeglass pin into the handcuffs
and I picked the handcuffs.
I could see the buildings off to my right.
One of them had a flag. That’s a police station.
I said, “Man, I’m gonna hide behind the police station.”
So I navigated down behind this alleyway.
I got down in this recessed area
and I just huddled and I just waited.
[sirens continue wailing]
It was so cold.
When I lost my core temperature like an hour later,
I was shivering. I was like, “Oh, my God. This is killing me.”
Like I was going into these bends. It was hurting.
My ribs were aching from going into these convulsions like that.
So I was hurting so bad. I’m gonna get up and get out of here.
I came flying out of that parking lot, and they saw me.
[helicopter whirring]
This guy came out of nowhere and just hovered above me.
And blinding candlelight of this magnitude I can’t even describe.
He circled, and he had the whole area lit. He came back and lit me up and lit me up.
This guy chased me for literally three hours with this helicopter.
My feet split open.
My calves erupted. My hamstrings were pulled.
But I got lucky, didn’t I?
The helicopter had a FLIR, forward-looking infrared camera,
and it wasn’t working because it was so cold,
it malfunctioned.
[bell dinging]
I ended up on a pair of railroad tracks
where I walked on broken feet for five miles.
[horn blows]
Until I got to Frazer, Pennsylvania, where I stole a car.
[glass shatters, car door opens]
It was a 1965 green Mustang.
[engine revs]
I found a quarter. I went over to the coin box.
I called a family member.
[buttons depressing]
I drove over to their house and they gave me a hundred dollars,
a handful of bandages and gauze
and a Philadelphia green Eagles ski cap,
like that wasn’t going to give away my city location.
I drove to New York City,
and I got a hotel room in the Bowery in a flophouse in the Lower East Side,
seven dollars a night.
I paid for a whole week in advance,
and then I went to a little bodega and got a box of Epsom salt,
and went up to my room.
Oh, my God.
I literally had institutional sock
all threaded into the torn tissue of my feet.
I just soaked in it and I started pulling it out
and it was like... I would just cry, man.
The first three days, that’s why I didn’t even venture out.
I literally couldn’t walk.
[car horns honking]
After four days, I went out one evening.
It was excruciating to finally go out.
Macy’s had this long display window
of all the electronic products, and there were all these televisions.
On them were all these different channels.
On some of them were the news.
There was the video footage of me obviously being hunted.
In that one moment, I was hit by the reality, I’m not free.
Not by a damn shot.
I am just temporarily out on a leash.
If they catch me, I’m going to catch a bullet.
It was so terrifying in that moment.
In 1985, you didn’t need to even show photo identification
to get on an airplane.
You didn’t have to show who you were or anything.
So I went to this upscale restaurant.
♪♪ [piano: jazz]
I just waited.
I just waited by the men’s room. Waiting, waiting.
Soon as I saw a guy go in the bathroom without a jacket on,
I walked over to his table and I stole his jacket.
He had his wallet in his jacket.
Then I went to the cloakroom and grabbed a fur coat, and I left.
[airplane passing]
So I simply just used a credit card,
bought last-minute tickets to Orlando.
When I got to Orlando, I told the taxi driver
to take me to the pawnshop area.
When I went into the shop, the guy behind the counter,
the owner, was obviously a criminal.
So I told him, “I don’t have any identification,
but I want to sell you this coat.”
So I negotiated with him to give me a gun and a hundred dollars for the coat,
which was worth, like, $5,000.
A very nice fur coat.
And so after he gave me the gun, he refused to give me bullets.
So he asked me if I was willing to rob this guy that he knew, Anthony Manilla,
who had a collection of gold coins that were worth $350 each.
He said there was at least a hundred of these coins in this guy’s house.
I met Anthony Manilla just outside of his house.
I was driving by on a bicycle I had bought at a flea market.
So when I rode by, I pretended that I recognized him from prison.
Anthony knew he didn’t know me, but he pretended he also recognized me
in that fake way some people do.
He asked me what I was up to.
I told him I had these pills for sale, but I couldn’t find anybody to buy ’em.
So he told me he could get me seven dollars each for ’em if I waited.
I knew and he knew that each pill was worth $30 each.
The cops in the area know he doesn’t have a valid license.
-[engine starts] -So he actually gave me the wheel.
We drive towards where I tell him I have the drugs stashed.
I pulled the gun out and I said, “Okay, freeze. I got you.”
He was like, “Okay. Just take it easy.”
I pulled over and demanded that he give me the knot of money
he had been bragging with.
He gave me that.
He had a Rolex watch and he had all this diamond jewelry all over him.
I said, “I gotta tie you up ’cause I gotta go back into your house
and get that money.”
He flat-out refused.
I said, “What do you mean, no?”
This is like a 140-pound person.
So I grabbed him and I said, “Please hold still.”
I tied his hands up, put him in the trunk. I slammed the trunk deck down.
I don’t know that the trunk deck clasp has gone through the rope
and is now just stuck, but not locked.
Because three red lights later, he jumps out.
When he jumps out, he looks like a mummy who’s unraveled.
He runs up to the car behind him and knocks on the window and says,
“He tried to rob me! He’s trying to rob me!”
Then he ran off.
The two women in my rearview mirror were looking at each other
and looking at me.
I just gunned it across the red light and went flying across this station road
and went right up the middle of Orlando.
I didn’t go back to his house.
So I drove all night.
And 2:30 in the morning, I get to Daytona Beach, Volusia County.
It’s Bike Week, March 10.
I’ve been an escaped prisoner tor 25 days.
I’m sitting there,
and I’m, like, I can’t get a hotel room anywhere.
It’s booked, everything solid.
My eyes were all gravelly and I was just so exhausted.
So I just put the seat back and went to sleep.
The next thing I know,
[knocking]
three sharp raps right on the window.
There’s a cop right there.
Fuck, my heart’s pounding.
He’s making the motion like this.
So, I put the window down. He said, “You hear anybody screaming?”
I said, “What?” He said, “Some woman screaming.
There’s been a call, a domestic dispute.
Is there a problem?”
I was like, “No.”
I was talking to him and I was just focusing on him, trying to answer him.
That’s when I heard from the passenger side,
the other officer yell out, “Hey, Burke, there’s a gun!”
He immediately pulls his weapon out. I said, “Hold on, hold on. What’s up?”
I didn’t know this, but about that much of the pistol
was laying out under a blanket.
[handcuffs ratcheting]
So, I got out of the car. I had my hands up.
I gave a false name.
They put handcuffs on me. They locked me up.
I’m sitting in prison. I’m waiting.
I said to hell with this.
[ringing]
-My father immediately picked up. -MAN: Hello?
I said, “Dad, I need you to call the FBI and tell them where I’m at.
If they don’t come and get me, I’m gonna go before this judge in the morning
and bail out and get out of here.”
-[receiver settles in cradle] -[dial tone]
He hung up the phone.
He called an agent by the name Bud Warner,
Philadelphia FBI office.
Man, the doors came open, they came flying in there.
[running footsteps]
[prison door slams]
They added 35 more years to my sentence for that robbery.
Put me on death row in Florida
and left me there to swelter all through that summer.
By the time they came and got me in September,
I was so eager to go back to Pennsylvania,
even though I knew I was going to get some serious beatings.
I had made an enemy of every guard on shift.
I was gonna go through some extreme punishment.
Man, it was hard.
[blow lands]
I stewed and I seethed.
I was so angry, I was beating my head on the wall.
So every couple of weeks, they’d take me out, patch my head up.
And... this one officer,
when he was escorting me back from the nurses’ station,
stopped by this cell and he said, “Go in there and get them books.”
So this guard-- Nice guy, too, turned out to be.
He lets me go into the cell, and I get these books.
Some of them were just too hard to read. You know?
You see, by the time I reached the eighth grade
at the age of 13,
school was just an area to meet up with your friends
to go swimming or fighting, you know?
So, my reading comprehension level was basic, to say the least.
But patience--
and I had all the time in the world.
So I started working with these books.
In the front of the general education development booklet
was a note:
tips of learning.
It said, “If you take a word and write out its spelling ten times
while covering each previous one
and then apply each of those to ten sentences, using that word,
you will not forget that word.”
The ten times rule.
So I sat there with a pen
and every word I didn’t understand, I did the ten times rules to it.
I remember, I would go through a day
where I would have 50-word days, 40-word days.
I counted days sometimes on the accomplishments
of being able to sit down and to orally go and say,
“Robert is a triskaidekaphobic.
Robert is afraid of the number 13.
Robert does not understand that it’s just an illusion
that 13 can harm him.”
I would just talk to myself until I had that one down.
Then I would move onto “phantasmagoria,”
and I would understand that phantasmagoria was the fear of ghosts.
I’d like, “Boo!” Ah.
I was just... I would just play with it.
It became like this stupid image of this kid sitting in a room by himself,
entertaining himself with words.
It was quiet because I was in the back of the “B” Block,
and I was just quietly just doing it.
Triskaidekaphobic, you know? The fear of 13.
And it worked.
For some reason, that small gesture of humanity by that guard
just changed everything for me.
I loved it. I was hooked on dime-store novels.
Series. Detective series.
Jack Higgins, Robert Ludlum, Elmore Leonard.
The first thousand books, I remember I was so proud of the accomplishment.
I had written down a thousand titles of a thousand different books
that I had personally read.
It took me three years.
I loved Rudyard Kipling.
I loved tales.
I loved storytelling of tales like Sinbad and Homer and...
Like, true storytelling is the telling of life, isn’t it?
Oh, I love it. I love it.
I’m so glad I was a drug addict in one way.
I was addicted to books, and I got hooked on them in the worst way.
Meanwhile I was reading law books, studying serology.
I went to college.
I really just opened up all this time and structure for reading.
With every new book,
I found something wonderful about myself.
I found...
I found myself. Like, it was wonderful.
I was happy on death row, at times, when I shouldn’t have been,
and it was only because I became comfortable
with being who I was, finally, in life.
[lock slides]
[buzzer sounds]
[chattering in distance]
That’s when I met Jacqui.
Jacqui Chaffer was a 31-year-old woman living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
who was going to visit some death-row prisoners
with her friend, Pamela Tucker,
who was the organizer of an abolitionist group from Pennsylvania.
They went monthly to prisons around Pennsylvania
and visited death-row prisoners to check on their mental state
to see if there was issues they could get involved with
to help the better treatment of the overall population
of death-row prisoners.
They came to the prison and they visited five men.
I was the fifth one.
The preceding prisoners all went out there and lamented how terrible it was.
The things they were encountering, the conditions and all that.
I walked in, I sat down and said hello to my friend Pam.
I asked her about her daughters.
We interacted about a few things.
I turned to Jacqui and started flirting with her.
I started being gregarious and open and...
It was completely unlike all the other men who came out
with little lists of things to talk about,
while I simply was myself.
She came back the next week by herself, scared to death.
So, in this four foot
by, literally, five-and-a-half-foot walled room,
she would walk in
and sit down with a notepad,
and we’d talk.
Week after week.
She drove 275 miles from Pittsburgh to Huntingdon
through these mountains, each way,
and we would start talking.
And it was weird.
I started to find out
one true thing about myself.
I think this is true for every prisoner who goes into prison at the age of 20
and is ready to exit in his 30s or 40s.
You can only grow so far as a man
until a woman teaches you enough about yourself
that you can further develop.
It’s only through the eyes of that person that you give yourself openly to
that they teach you so many things about yourself
that are qualities that you rely upon and like and respect
because you’ve been shown from afar something no mirror--
believe me, I didn’t have a mirror--
could show you.
But at the heart of it, I kept feeling dirty.
I did not want to be that prisoner
who’s serving life, who lets a woman fall in love with him,
knowing he’s gonna suck the life out of her.
I had the death penalty plus 105 years.
I wasn’t going anywhere.
Then I get a newspaper.
It’s funny how my whole story and life and this journey
has all been changed by either photographs or newspapers.
But there it was,
five months after I had met Jacqui, four months.
“Newly developed DNA science makes a big splash in the crime world.
Criminal convictions being reversed.”
People were walking out left and right and left and right.
Whoa.
I write a letter to Jacqui. I cut the article out. I send it to her.
She came back on that visit.
As soon as the door was closed, I said, “I didn’t kill that woman.”
Like that was the first thing I shout.
That was the first time I told her.
I was like, “I got two things to tell you.
One, I didn’t kill Mrs. Craig,
and two, I think I’m in love with you too.”
She’s like, “Let’s handle the first one first.
You know what I mean? Let’s deal with the difficult one first.”
I was like, “Oh, man.”
[car door closes]
-[engine revving] -MAN: All right, Randall! Way to go, man!
All right!
In the 1970s, a lot of the vehicles
still didn’t have locks on the steering column,
so you could just stick a screwdriver into the key slot
and literally just turn the ignition.
So, my friend Eddie and I used to steal the early Fords.
Then we would joyride.
This man knew we were 15-year-old kids,
knew we didn’t own the car and knew that it was stolen.
He’s like, “Come here. I’ll give you $200 for the car.”
We looked at each other. $200 was an enormous amount of money.
We figured we just hit the jackpot.
We knew he owned a collision center that fixed and repaired cars.
So we said, “Can we get you another car?”
He told us what one he would need, when he needed it,
and we’d go out and look for it.
[airplane passing overhead]
[engine cranking]
So, usually, my friends and I would go to the Philadelphia airport
and wait for what we called “vics.”
[tires squealing]
Which was somebody who walked up,
took their luggage out of the rear of the car
and then walked inside with their family members to see them off.
-[tires squealing] -And never got a car when they came out.
I’ve had several people, you know, in the rearview mirror,
chasing behind you as you drove off with their car.
You dropped the car off, got $200, $300,
and then you took that money and you bought drugs.
By the time I was 17,
I was really, really getting hooked on methamphetamine.
My favorite vein was right there on the outside.
I can still feel the hole in my arm.
I can still taste the drug in my mouth.
When you inject methamphetamine into your arm,
you get the burning, numbing sensation shoot up your arm,
and then you get the taste of ethanol in your mouth.
It’s like a cough.
[exhaling]
Just like that.
Then the other Nicky came out.
The one I didn’t cringe in the mirror from.
The one who wasn’t weak. The one who wasn’t afraid.
[panting]
I wasn’t just hooked on one drug.
I was a mess of multiple drugs and alcohol.
By December 20, I had already been homeless on the streets
for about most of that year.
That’s when I stole two cars in a row.
I got $500 each, and I went out. I started partying again.
I was on the binge.
“Burning it,” they called it.
Every time I think of that night, I smell wet, burning leaves.
It’s almost sweet.
I was driving around in another stolen car.
♪♪ [stereo: rock, faint]
MAN: ♪ And it seems nobody’s interested in learning ♪
♪ But the teacher ♪
-The radio was blasting. -[siren wailing]
He must have heard the radio before he saw me.
♪ Obligation to our nation ♪
When he flew out, I knew he was gonna stop me.
I just felt it coming right at me.
And I...
-[pounding chest] -The adrenaline.
His hand’s on the butt of his gun.
Here he comes.
Now I’m like, “Oh, I can’t stop it.” [gasping]
“I know. I can’t do anything.”
I remember looking, just like that.
[mouthing words] I don’t understand whatever he’s saying.
His hand’s going-- [mouthing words]
-The door pops, and the vacuum now... -♪♪ [rock]
When the door comes open, and there’s all that quiet on the street,
and the noise on the radio’s still going “bam, bam, bam!”
That’s when I realized the radio was still on.
♪♪ [rock]
“You didn’t stop for that light. Didn’t you see the stop sign?”
All those things, but I’m panicked, you know?
I remember I did that, like, stand up.
And he was right against my throat
with his forearm, back against the car, when he shoved me back like that.
I remember coming up with my left arm, like that.
And it was like going right for the stick,
and I just followed it along, grabbed his arm.
He had the stick come out.
I take it right out like it was nothing,
right out of his hand.
He was furious!
And that’s when the right hand came up.
I saw that gun.
I grabbed and I reached out.
I just pushed his arms straight down.
You felt the percussion of the blast.
-[whooshing] -And then you heard the pop.
-[gunshot blast] -[gasps]
“Okay! Okay! Okay!”
He stuck the gun like right there. He said, “You son of a bitch!
You almost got us killed!” He’s like, “Get in the car!”
And he slammed me in the back in the cage area, shut the door.
“Shots fired, officer assist.”
I remember he said it four times.
I remember I was just sitting there like this.
I-- “What the hell happened?”
-[keys jangling] -[door slams]
They threw me in the intake unit,
and I crashed.
I must have slept at least 16 hours.
[lock clicks]
I was so scared. They pulled me out.
I’d been arrested enough to know this one’s scary, this is serious.
This one’s bad.
The public defender was this young kid. And he turned to me.
He said, “Mr. Yarris, do you understand the serious nature of these charges?
If you’re convicted of these charges, you face life imprisonment.”
I said, “What’s my charges?”
He said, “Kidnapping of a police officer,
attempted murder of a police officer,
reckless endangerment, possession of a firearm,
robbery, resisting arrest,
possession of a stolen vehicle.”
I started crying.
They take me back to the cell,
and there was the newspaper.
The December 16 Delaware County Daily Times.
The front page was missing, so the front page on it was page three.
And right there was the story of Linda Mae Craig.
And I swear...
something about that newspaper kept calling me.
On December 15, 1981, at 4:05 p.m.,
Linda Mae Craig left work.
She was knocked out of her shoes in the car park of the Tri-State Mall,
drug into a car that she owned
and then driven into the state of Pennsylvania
about two and a half miles away,
where she was taken behind a church,
where she was stabbed after being raped, and dumped in the car park.
The next morning,
two children... walked up to what they thought was a mannequin
that had been covered in the newly fallen snow.
One of the boys walked up and kicked the snow
from the face of the mannequin
so they could see if it was a boy or a girl mannequin,
only to discover the disfigured face of Mrs. Craig.
I lived 20-some miles from the murder scene,
and I said, “Man, if I had knowledge
about a crime this big, I can get out of this.
I’ll bet you, they would let me out. Then I could get out on bail and I’d run.”
Like the stupid mind of a child.
So I sat in my cell and I started making up a story,
and I said I would tell ’em that somebody did the murder, right?
I had to find out who I could blame. The only one I could think of was Jimmy.
I had met Jimmy Brisbois in 1980,
when I was doing drugs, and I stole some coins
from a car that I had gotten from the airport.
1,000 coins-- there was a lot of coins in this big bag.
I made the mistake of showing Jimmy,
and out of nowhere, his friend hit me with this .357 Magnum.
[blow landing]
I still got a chip out of my eyebrow that I can rub at this time.
And they had an old carpet in the front room that nobody used
in this house we were living in on Woodland Avenue.
So, they rolled me up in the rug,
threw me into this pickup truck that Jimmy had,
and they took me behind the Westinghouse warehouse.
And I heard this “spwoof.” [imitates gunshot] Like that.
One of them took a .22-caliber pistol and shot the rug.
But being drug addict idiots that they were,
they shot it where the folded part over the rug was about two feet above my head,
way out of range of anywhere I was.
I was enraged.
I went looking for Jimmy.
“Hey, Michael, what happened to your buddy Jimmy?”
’Cause he knew Jimmy.
“What happened to your old rat bastard Jimmy? I ain’t seen him for a while.”
That’s when he told me the story. Jimmy and his friends were in Jersey.
Jimmy had an overdose.
They weren’t taking him to the hospital to get arrested,
so they dumped him, stole his drugs.
“And he’s dead, so you don’t have to look for him no more.”
[fizzing]
All I wanted them to do was lower my bail enough
that I was allowed out temporarily, at which time I could abscond.
Jimmy was dead. They were going to find out eventually, right?
They took me to the warden’s office.
They brought me in, took my handcuffs off.
The warden goes, “Hey, get him a drink. Get him a cold drink.”
They went out, got me a Coca-Cola. I’m sitting in a lounge chair.
No longer in a prison setting.
I’m sitting there, and he’s got my file.
He’s like, “Ah, man, you’re-- you’re-- you’re a young guy.
What are you charged with all this for?
You don’t have any violence on your records. What’s this bullshit?
Attempted murder? That doesn’t sound like you, Nick. You’re a car thief.
What’s going on here?”
I tell him my story.
Like a proud parent, everyone’s praising me.
In just a few hours, I went from sitting there
with a hundred thousand dollar bail,
waiting to go to prison for the rest of my life,
to being told I was gonna have a hearing set up next week
in which I would possibly be released on my own recognizance,
and my charges would be reduced to nothing more than resisting arrest.
When they found James Brisbois alive,
you could have knocked me over with a feather.
Jimmy had gotten off of drugs, gotten his life together.
I was screwed.
When they came back to me, they knew two things.
One: James Brisbois had nothing to do with that crime,
and I had more information than anyone else.
It was all guesswork, but it didn’t matter to them.
-[footsteps] -[keys jangling]
-[lock clicks] -[door opens]
I was charged with the abduction,
rape and murder of a woman I had never met in my life.
I was already sitting in prison
for the attempted murder of a police officer.
I’m a 20-year-old drug addict
who’s been thrown out of his own house onto the streets by his own family.
What chance do I have?
No one’s gonna believe me.
[chattering]
[gavel rapping]
In April, the trial for the attempted murder and kidnapping
of Officer Benjamin Wright was to be given.
By then I had already been charged with the murder of Linda Mae Craig,
so the media was having a field day with stalker stories
and making me out to be a complete deranged lunatic.
So my trial began, and Officer Wright testified.
He got up on the stand and started telling a completely different story
than what actually happened.
He said when he pulled up to the car, I had opened the door,
got out and punched him in the face and knocked his glasses off his face.
He then said he was trying to flail and defend himself while I pummeled him
a couple more times in the face before I reached down
and grabbed his gun and took his gun from him.
And afterwards, he said, I had the gun pointed directly at his face
when he heroically reached out with both hands and grabbed the gun
and pulled it from me as it discharged right next to his face.
And he had a photograph of his hand,
with the two and a half centimeter scratch on it,
to prove all of the things that he said.
[chair scraping floor]
-And Sam Stretton, my defense lawyer, -[feedback from mike]
got up and calmly walked over with a photograph in his hand,
placed the photograph down on the bar of the witness box
in front of Officer Wright and said,
“Is it your testimony that Nicholas Yarris
punched you in the face three times, breaking your eyeglasses?
He then took this pistol--” And held it up and said,
“Hit you in the face with it, a seven-pound metal object, twice.
Why didn’t you photograph your face?”
Officer Wright knew that the jig was up.
He said, “I’m a good-looking man. I didn’t want the jury to see my face scratched up.
I don’t have to show that.” He got all defiant.
The jury made this snorting, scoffing kind of noise.
Everyone saw in that one moment that his story was really a lie.
[feedback]
The jury deliberated tor a very short, very, very short time
and came right back: “Not guilty of attempted murder.
Not guilty of kidnapping of a police officer.
Not guilty, aggravated assault.
All charges, not guilty.”
And then Barry Gross, the prosecutor, who was really pissed off--
He was so angry, he tells the jury,
“You just let a murderer go. You let him go, you know?”
The jury foreman was this woman who stood up and said,
“Excuse me, we didn’t try that case.
We tried this case, and your case stinks.”
And my mom said, “Yeah! That’s right. Tell ’em again, lady.”
And it was the worst thing.
Oh, my God.
The very next week, Barry Gross takes over the murder prosecution
and begins seeking the death penalty.
I went from April, when I was acquitted of all charges,
to the June trial for the murder of Mrs. Craig.
I was so scared.
Arthur Craig, the victim’s husband, was asked to testify.
-That first click in the rotation-- -[imitates slide machine]
and there it was, the portrait photograph.
Mr. Craig, Mrs. Craig
and their three adopted children in a family-type setting.
And the prosecutor asked Arthur Craig, “Is that your wife?
Can you identify the people in the photograph?”
He did, along with his wife as well.
And then-- [imitates slide machine]
There was Mrs. Craig laid out on the autopsy table.
Six stab wounds clearly visible,
and her broken teeth and everything visible.
There was a gasp almost.
And people were looking away.
[imitates slide machine] The next one.
The photograph was white and black,
but for when you got closer
towards that figure that was covered in snow,
you could see the children’s footprints
in white snow,
and then they scattered.
The first steps were dark, and then lighter,
so you had to imagine
it was bloody,
and that they must have been horrified as they looked down
and saw the treads of their own feet
blood-soaked as they ran in different directions.
And the jury, they looked up at the screen,
they looked at me,
and like uniform animals in one of those documentaries
where they all do an alike thing, they all went...
And it was the last time any one of them could look at me.
I had just turned 21,
and they were gonna take my life.
The only science that was available
in the early ’80s
was blood type.
That was the cutting edge of technology as far as identifying someone.
That was it.
And there was no real evidence at my trial.
Not a signed confession, not a eyewitness testimony,
no murder weapon-- nothing but speculation and circumstantial evidence.
But unfortunately, I shared the same blood group as the murderer.
And at the time, that made me a near slam dunk for being,
probably, the person who did it.
And then in February of 1988,
there’s this newspaper article about DNA testing.
And... I’m blown away.
I can’t believe I have the key to my cell in my hands,
because I know I didn’t kill that woman.
I know none of my biological material is anywhere near her.
I wrote to Joe Bullen, my lawyer,
and I asked him to begin the process of the DNA.
And the phone call, I can still recall--
All weekend I was just on pins and needles,
and then Monday morning I get taken downstairs at 10:00 a.m.,
which is a bad time because they’ve got all the food going.
They brought in the food trucks and they’re banging and clanging
these metal plates that they put food on,
and they put ’em in these racks and run ’em up these stairs,
and it’s just noise and it’s all going.
I get ahold of the secretary first, then Joe Bullen, and he says,
“I got news for you. You gotta slow down.” I was like, “What, what?”
He says, “The coroner has explained to me
that they’ve lost all of the autopsy material.”
And there was just banging and yelling.
I didn’t hear him. I was like,
“Slow down. Say that again. What do you mean?”
And I’m like, I wanted to turn around and yell out, “Just please shut up.”
But I knew that would get my ass whupped.
So I just stood there shaking with the phone in my hand, and I said,
“What do you mean the autopsy materials? That’s the stuff they used at my trial.
Is that what you’re trying to tell me? All the evidence has been thrown away?
What do they-- How am I still on death row if after your trial--”
And I start talking like this, and he’s yelling into the phone,
“I said, shut up for a minute and I’ll tell you.”
In this very supercilious voice he said,
“The coroner’s office has looked all weekend,
and I just got off the phone with him at 9:28 a.m.,
and he’s informed me they’ve lost all the autopsy material
from the Linda Mae Craig--”
And he’s reading from something, like his notes or his crib notes
of what his conversation was, and it was very deadpan.
And I started getting angry. I said,
“Do you remember when you came to first visit me,
you told me I was guilty ’cause of all the overwhelming evidence?
Well, where’s the overwhelming evidence when I want DNA, Joe?”
-[line clicks, dial tone] -He hung up.
I go back up in my cell, and I’m furious.
I wanted to fucking kill somebody, I was so angry.
I was out of visits for the month.
That meant I had to wait until March to see Jacqui again
and explain to her that the evidence was lost,
and... we had no hope.
So, uh,
I went like completely blank.
But then, after a while,
I started to think, like, that’s not possible,
’cause at my trial they went on and on
about how “the killer had B-positive blood, didn’t he?”
I said to myself, “Well, wait a minute. Who did the test on that?”
I started reading the trial transcripts, then I found out
some material was sent to a laboratory at the time of my trial.
I wrote to the lab director and he wrote me back.
He said, “Dear Mr. Yarris, I have searched my files,
and we do have two slide preparations that are unstained,
and they have high weight visible DNA, from sperm.”
And I was like, “Oh, my God!”
If this DNA works, I not only can prove my innocence,
but I can be outta here in a few years.
And it was like opening up this floodgate to this woman, Jacqui.
I married her on July 1, 1988,
six years to the day that I was sentenced to die.
I was so in love. Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
Like I was into this thing
where music was beautiful.
If it rained outside and I caught the smell of it through my window,
even though I couldn’t actually see the rain, it was beautiful.
Like every little nuance in life was magical.
And I loved this person in my life so much.
And I was like offering this person not only hope
that I could prove myself innocent and get off death row,
but I could be home, and we could be beginning a life.
[sighs]
[footsteps]
And then one year became two and three.
It took us five years to get to the DNA test.
And the results came back inconclusive.
“Inconclusive results due to degradation.”
But then, in a miracle of miracles,
the victim’s clothing was located in a clerk’s office at the courthouse.
My mother had recoiled in horror at the end of my trial,
when my parents were almost accidentally given a box marked “Yarris,”
and inside of it was the victim’s blood-soaked clothing.
And she remembered that and she told the custodian,
“Don’t you remember how you almost gave me the victim’s clothing?”
And he said, “Oh, that’s right.”
And he went off and found the victim’s clothing.
Those clothes yielded sperm from the victim’s underwear.
And it was high weight and there was a lot of it.
Cuttings were placed into these tubes,
and then they were sent to Germantown, Maryland for keeping.
It took me from 1993 to 1997
to finally get court approval
for the foremost authority of DNA in America to do the DNA testing.
Hallelujah, I got Dr. Blake.
He already did the O.J. Simpson case.
He’s very famous, very well respected. He’s the man.
They take the new evidence and they send it out to California,
and they improperly package it, and it burst open in transit.
And Dr. Blake says, “We’re not gonna test it.
All it will do is produce results that would be contested by the prosecution.
I’m not gonna test it.” And he just put it on the shelf.
It killed a part of my marriage and it killed a part of Jacqui
and it killed a part of me.
She fought with me for nine years to get DNA,
and she just said, “Nicky, I can’t do this anymore.”
I said, “Man, go.”
I went back to my cell and was sitting, listening to the radio
and this song came on-- and I was listening to the lyrics, you know.
“They say that you’re leaving, and it comes as no surprise.
And still I like this feeling of being left behind.”
MAN: ♪ You say that you’re leaving ♪
And I was listening to the lyrics and I was thinking,
“You always do that to me.
You always torment me with words from someone else’s song,
and suddenly they’re my words and they’re ingrained in my thoughts.”
Even though I was being told that I-- that they were leaving,
I still kinda liked that feeling of being left behind.
It’s a strange phenomenon when you felt good for their leaving
because you knew all along you had stolen a lot of their life away.
♪ Well, it’s just like going home ♪
And on a December night,
on a snowing night, just like the lyrics said,
I just started writing this letter.
I wasn’t crying or upset or anything.
I simply sat down and tried to tell somebody why I loved them
and why saying good-bye to them was this wonderful gift.
I knew she didn’t have to fight for me anymore.
I knew she didn’t have to make copies of my legal documents
and send them back to me, call lawyers, chase up new DNA.
She didn’t have to go and chase up my mom
or any of these other things.
She could just be free. One of us.
♪♪ [continues]
♪ The same snow is falling ♪
You see, at the end of that wonderful gift
that was given to me for so long, I didn’t cling,
trying to hold onto what wasn’t mine anyway, ’cause it was a gift.
It was like a ten-year confirmation
that I was becoming that person that I liked.
I was so proud of that, like--
I woke up to a different person.
♪♪ [man vocalizing]
♪♪ [ends]
By now, I had been in prison for 18 years,
and that’s when I got sick.
I lost 31 pounds in a month and a half.
And I was really feeling poorly.
And then I had blood work done and they told me what it was.
I’m infected with this strain of hepatitis C
that all the men who had dental work at Huntingdon have contracted.
Fifteen other men got this hepatitis.
So the first guy that died was D.C., Del Carter.
And he died in the vents underneath me, screaming in agony.
Oh, my God. So when I found out,
I immediately said, “Yeah, I’ll take the drug treatments.
I’ll sign up for it.”
But the years of drug abuse had damaged my kidneys,
and after about seven months,
I started suffering all the side effects of this drug.
I was peeing this horrible coffee-colored urine.
[inhales deeply] Everything tasted dead in my mouth.
I was just not right.
And then, it was August, I was out in the exercise yards.
I was so weak. I was looking directly up at the sky.
-And then-- -[snaps fingers]
I couldn’t see anything. It went blank.
I know what darkness is, but this was black.
And that’s when I found out I was dying.
I was so afraid that, like, I was shaking.
I really was.
And so, I remember, I stuck to my ritual.
I stood over the top of the toilet bowl and I bathed.
And I was doing the same ritual of bathing three days later,
and I saw these swirls around my thighs.
And I realized I was seeing swirls,
so if I was seeing swirls, then I was seeing.
[exhales] Okay.
The very first thing I did later on that evening
is I sat by a very bright light at my desk,
and I wrote a letter to the judge handling my appeals.
And another song-- Patty Griffin’s “Gonna Let Him Fly.”
And it’s so strange, because the lyrics are obviously a love song,
but to me it was all about me, you know.
“Ain’t no talking to this man. Ain’t no pretty other side.”
It’s so true.
There is absolutely no pretty side to hope for anymore.
No Jacquis, no loves.
None of those things that you can have a pretty other side to hope for.
WOMAN: ♪ Ain’t no talking to this man ♪
♪ Ain’t no pretty other side ♪
♪ Ain’t no way to understand ♪
♪ The stupid words of pride ♪
♪ ’Cause it would take an acrobat ♪
♪ I already tried all that, so ♪
♪ I’m gonna let him fly ♪
♪ Things can move at such a pace ♪
♪ The second hand just waved good-bye ♪
YARRIS: “Dear Judge Giles, As a criminal plaintive,
I ask that one right that I have remaining to me
as a condemned prisoner be recognized.
And that is a condemned man’s right to be executed.”
♪ I said, “I’m gonna let him fly” ♪
“I hereby ask that counsel be dismissed,
that my record be then transmitted to Governor Edward Rendell
for my execution date to be set within 60 days of receipt of this letter.”
♪ It took a while to understand ♪
♪ The beauty of just letting go ♪
“I hereby swear that I am sane at the time of this writing.”
♪ I already tried all that ♪
“Signed, Nicholas James Yarris, August 2002.”
♪ Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh ♪
♪ I’m gonna let him fly ♪
♪ Fly, fly ♪
♪ I’m gonna let him ♪
♪ Fly ♪
When the letter was received by Judge Giles,
he ordered that my lawyers come to a conference hearing,
and he wanted to know why someone
who had been asking for DNA testing for 15 years,
claiming that they’re innocent, would now ask to be executed.
And he was really hard-pressed to get them to give up any answer, I guess,
because I didn’t copy them in on the letter.
They didn’t even know I wrote to the judge.
They were hearing this for the first time.
So the judge, by law, really was hamstrung in the fact
that he was gonna be required to transmit my record to the governor,
as law required, for me to be executed within 60 days from that point.
Instead he said, “All right, whatever DNA testing is remaining in this case,
I’m ordering it now tested.”
That was April.
April turned to May, May turned to June.
July 2, 2003.
I wasn’t expecting the results.
For some reason, when he brought the phone to my cell,
I really wasn’t expecting to talk to my lawyers about Dr. Blake.
But he gave me the phone and said, “Your lawyer wants you to call.”
So I dialed the number,
and I’m waiting for the collect phone call process to ring through,
and it does, and on the other end was Michael Wiseman,
a lawyer who had been representing me for seven years.
When I heard Michael Wiseman say,
“I just got off the phone with Dr. Blake.
The gloves that were left inside the victim’s vehicle
were found to have DNA from unknown male,
DNA from Mrs. Craig
and DNA from the sperm matching the killer’s gloves.”
That was-- I didn’t have to hear anything else.
I knew. You didn’t have to tell Nick Yarris what those results meant.
I started screaming, “Oh, my God! It proves me innocent, don’t you see?”
[heavy footsteps]
The guard came back to collect the phone and he saw me huddled,
crying on the bed, in a fetal position.
And he said, “Nick, what’s up?”
And I lifted my head up, and I just shook my head
’cause I didn’t even have the strength to say anything.
He said, “Go down to the shower and take a shower.”
I got up, put on my shower shoes,
and I started trudging towards the shower,
and he opened the gate down on the end of the block,
and he walked into the shower and he put a chair in there,
and as I got the last few steps there,
he grabbed my arm gently and he sat me down,
and he just pushed the button and he left me there.
[shower running]
And I cried.
I cried like you wouldn’t believe, man.
I waited 15 years to cry.
[rain pattering]
The happiest memory I ever had
is that we lived at 2439 Milan Street,
just like Italy-- Milan.
There was a fiberglass awning
attached to the front of our roof,
and whenever it rained, it gave off this hollow drumming sound
that just drew me out of wherever I was and whatever I was doing.
And I would get a blanket
and Jocko, my dog, who was a little black poodle,
and we would go out and sit on this lounge chair
that was set up like a deck chair.
And there, under this tattered old green blanket,
I would listen to the rain
and play out all of these daydreams in my head
of adventures I would have.
And it was like this... cocoon.
All I had was that blanket and a dog
and this... feeling
that I was on a journey.
[boy breathing heavily]
I remember, as I ran out the door with Jocko,
the last thing Mom said was,
“Don’t you dare get those school clothes dirty!”
[breathing heavily]
It was still early, early like April.
And in Philadelphia in the springtime, it’s just beautiful.
Like 67, 68 degrees,
and you just get these very nice days.
Jocko and I were just throwing the stick
and doing the things that we loved to do.
I was walking along, deeper into the woods,
when I saw him.
I said, “Damn.” Like, I was so afraid of him.
Hobnail boots, denim jeans,
white T-shirt, armband rolled up
with a pack of Lucky Strikes in the sleeve.
And he said, “The fuck are you doing?”
Like that, you know?
“Take it.”
I looked up towards the houses, then I went like that.
And he said, “Now puff.” And I went-- [puffs]
And I just got--
[groans] My head went crazy.
And like I heard like this sound--
[loud slap]
And it was the stone that was in his hand that he hit me with.
And then I felt him bend down, and he turned me,
so that our shoulders were parallel
and my leg was on his arm there, and he was raping me.
And he was making this guttural sound.
And I started, like, whimpering.
And he’s like, “Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up.
I’ll fucking kill Jocko and your whole family if you say anybody. You understand?
I’m not a fucking faggot. You understand me?”
Then he left. And I screamed.
I was like, “Jocko!” [sobs]
I kept screaming for Jocko.
One of the things that he said to me,
when he was putting his pants right--
He looked at me. “You tell everybody you fell off a wall
with that shopping cart over there, you hear me?”
He gave me this quick rundown of what to say.
And as soon as I’d told the first lie,
it was like once it was believed, it was so hard to undo.
It spiraled.
And then everything changed.
[shower shuts off]
From that day I found out I was proven innocent from science,
it still took me seven more months.
I went back to death row,
and I found out they took everything out of my death-row cell,
and then they took me to this unit.
I was beside myself. They took me to “H” Block, the mental ward.
“What are you doing to me?” I didn’t understand.
I went over and saw Major Lockett, the major of the guards.
I said, “Yo, Major, what’s going on? Why am I here?”
And he said, “Mr. Yarris,
after the experience that you had,
we don’t want to risk any of the staff
being murdered by you in a rage,
in recognition for what we’ve done to you.”
I went back to my cell,
and I had a plastic milk carton, and that was it.
A plastic mattress, two sheets, two towels,
a pillowcase for that plastic pillow, and that was it.
They took every book. They took my artwork.
They took every comfort.
And I sat down on my bed,
and I-- I said,
“Oh, my God, they did me a favor.”
I folded my legs, I sat straight in my yoga position,
and I started to dream of the life I was gonna have.
I was gonna have a great life.
I’m gonna meet me a girl, I’m gonna fall in love.
I’m gonna have a family and, best of all, I’m gonna be a great dad.
That’s what I’m gonna do.
If you’re gonna take everything from me-- okay.
Then instead,
I think I’ll give myself everything.
MAN: ♪ Gray ♪
♪ The color of a cloudy day ♪
MAN, WOMAN: ♪ On the wind I heard you ♪
♪ Call my name ♪
♪ On the wind I heard you call my name ♪
♪ On the wind I heard you ♪
♪ Gone ♪
♪ And everything I did wrong ♪
♪ It don’t add up to this ♪
♪ Lost ♪
♪ And I measure the cost in years without a kiss ♪
♪ Entire lives I’ve missed ♪
♪ Red ♪
♪ And I thought those ♪
♪ Old questions were dead ♪
♪ But every night I saw you close your eyes ♪
♪ Every night I saw you close your eyes ♪
♪ Every night I saw you ♪
♪♪ [continues, instrumental]
♪ Dee ♪
♪ I used to visit you ♪
♪ In my sleep ♪
♪ Now I can never find you in my dreams ♪
♪ I can never find you in my dreams ♪
♪ I can never find you ♪