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Chapter 5

5

Tanya was true to her word. When I stopped by WFC on my way back to Tallahassee, she was at lunch, but the records were waiting for me at the front desk in a banker’s box with an invoice. I tried not to outwardly cringe at the figure and wrote the check out slowly to give myself time to consider whether it would bounce. Probably not. The man behind the desk watched me lazily from his straining reclined chair. I couldn’t decide if the poor chair or his uniform buttons were in more agony, stretched against his massive bulk. He hadn’t even bothered to speak when I arrived, just nodded toward the box. Perhaps he was contemplating my account balance as well, dreaming idle correctional officer dreams of thinner days when he could have apprehended me in the parking lot before I made my felonious check-writing escape. No, I realized, as I tore the check from my book. He’d been staring down my blouse as I leaned over the desk. Asshole.

The box wasn’t quite full and I’d managed to snag a spot near the admin building, so it gave me great pleasure to refuse his half-hearted offer of assistance to a “little lady.” Even better, I was able to lug the box balanced against my hip in one hand so I looked like a bad ass. (You can bet he hadn’t moved it, so he didn’t know how heavy it was, or wasn’t.) My desire to throw the box at him to see how fast he could move was a strong itch in need of scratching.

A life lived in the South taught me long ago to take offensive chauvinistic offers and diminutive titles as well-intentioned but misguided remnants of a chivalrous code that wasn’t all bad. I often used those fossils to my advantage, and sometimes they even gave me a touch of the warm and fuzzies. I can’t say my irritation with the man was out of character for me, but it was disproportionate to the quick peek he’d had. I suspected my bad temper was a result of Grandma Harrison’s animosity.

What was with the paranoia? Her accusations that I was lying about her daughter before I’d even started my investigation made me wonder what I’d find. What could be so bad about a child that her mother could refuse to accept it as truth, nearly twenty-five years after her death? No point speculating; it just made me dwell on the woman’s ill will. A little music therapy (singing along with my favorite road trip CDs at the top of my lungs) flushed the prickles out of my system. I managed to not think about Mrs. Harrison or anyone related to her by blood or marriage for the remaining hour drive back to Tallahassee. No doubt about it—the woman was a distraction I wasn’t being paid enough to deal with. For that matter, I wasn’t being paid to deal with her at all, as I’d remind Noel at the next opportunity.

When I got home, I set the box of records on my desk in the living room. In my gallivanting around the Panhandle I’d forgotten to eat lunch, or even my dried-up peanuts, and my tummy was gurgling. Tallahassee is a town that eats depressingly early—try finding a restaurant that’s open after 9 p.m. and you’ll end up at a twenty-four-hour diner—but at 4 p.m. it was early for dinner even by Tallahassee standards. Since Ben wouldn’t be coming over this evening (he had some kind of sports things at school) I embraced the flexibility and eccentricity of the self-employed. Grabbing a couple of slices of leftover pizza, I added a Mexican beer with a slightly shriveled lime to round out the meal and took it all to my desk.

Three hours later, I had stale pizza crust, a stiff neck, and a few pages of notes to show for my efforts. The box representing the last years of Isaac Thomas’s life had gained some color too. A tagging system for reviewing records is essential—I use yellow for useful information I may need in the future, green for items of interest that require more investigation, and red for knock your socks off revelations. The color scheme was skewed toward yellow and green, as is usual, but there were a couple of items in red as well. Generally what red lacks in quantity, it makes up for in quality.

Although only a few pages in length, the Pre-Sentence Investigation Report (PSI) was the most colorful section of the box. A PSI can be requested by the sentencing judge or one of the parties, and it’s always prepared by the Department of Corrections. It often includes a statement from the investigating officer that headed the investigation, and may also include a statement from the defendant. There was nothing from Isaac Thomas in this one, but there was a brief statement from the investigating officer, Rudy Nagroski. His words weren’t nearly as personal or as vengeful as some I’ve read. It sounded like standard language, and only requested generally that punishment be commensurate with the crime. Mr. Nagroski definitely went in the green column.

The statement of the facts of the case must have been from one of the case reports or from an informal discussion with one of the investigating officers. The source wasn’t identified, and the summary was brief with little detail. Vanda Thomas was discovered in the evening hours of October 6, 1980, by a neighbor. She was lying fully clothed on the bed. There were some signs of struggle in the bedroom. Isaac had struck her several times in the face, then manually choked her to death. Although it technically couldn’t be used in his “score” (to lengthen his sentence) because there had been no conviction, another section of the PSI noted that there was a previous complaint of domestic violence against him. The complaint number was provided—big green tab. The complaint had been less than a year before Vanda’s murder.

Also in the green column was Isaac’s Public Defender, Sam Norton. I wasn’t familiar with the name, but I knew Ralph would be. Sam Norton had pled Isaac out before they could go to trial. Isaac got twenty-five years to life for first-degree murder. Didn’t sound like much of a deal to me, but what do I know? In the 80s, parole might have sounded like a real possibility. In fact, with prison overcrowding in the mid 90s, some guys were getting five and ten times or more of their time served as gain time, only serving a fraction of their original sentence. It wasn’t until building prisons overtook building schools as a priority that the legislature was able to really “get tough” on crime. Now with a myriad of sentence enhancements and minimum mandatories, sentences were longer to begin with, and inmates had to serve 85% of their sentence before they’re eligible for parole. And good luck getting it then.

The rest of the information in the box was mostly yellow, for example, all those magic dates and numbers that would hopefully enable me to access every bit of information about Isaac Thomas. Still, a picture of the man began to appear in his incarceration records. He had only two DRs (disciplinary reports) in his twenty years of incarceration. One of these had nothing to do with Isaac’s conduct. There’d been a minor incident of vandalism in his wing, and when the officer was unable (or unwilling) to determine the identity of the perpetrator, he wrote up everyone. The other was for a fight on the yard. There were statements from 7 inmates swearing that Isaac had intervened to stop the fight, and he wasn’t seriously disciplined.

Isaac’s inmate request forms were always respectful (as were the responses from the officers in charge), and they were rarely for purely personal benefit. Many of the prisons in Florida aren’t air conditioned in summer and are poorly heated in winter, so sometimes he asked for extra fans or blankets, depending on the season. Other times it was something as trivial as permission for the wing to stay up an extra half hour to watch the NBA play-offs. He’d been issued an extra T-shirt—could he give it to so-and-so next door who was short one? Would it be possible to get their legal mail delivered earlier so they had more time to respond before the next pick-up? All the minutiae that make up day-to-day life in a prison.

It wasn’t until I got near the back of the box, or closer in time to the present, that red flags appeared. There were only two, and one of these was an optimistic categorization—it didn’t exactly knock my socks off, but my gut said it could with a little more digging.

All prisons have their own medical facilities, but treatment of illness obviously isn’t the focus of our prison system (I’m not even sure it’s the focus of our health care system) so these facilities are limited. Often an inmate requiring specialized tests or suffering from a serious illness is sent to a separate prison medical facility. A couple of weeks before Isaac committed suicide, he received a medical transfer. He was returned to WFC the next day, so it was probably just for testing. Still, there could be a connection to his death. Southern prisons aren’t exactly known for their oncology wings. Isaac wouldn’t be the first person to choose the time of his demise rather than suffer the pain and humiliation of a protracted illness.

The other one was a true red flag. Isaac’s PSI reflected that he had no living family. This information didn’t come from Isaac, so it probably came from his trial attorney, and it was consistent with what Noel had told me. However, a few months before he committed suicide, Isaac added someone to his visitor’s list for approval, a woman named Ida Pickett. Well, to say he added her name is misleading. Hers was the only name he had ever submitted as a potential visitor during his twenty lonely years of incarceration. There was no other mention of Ms. Pickett, and no indication that she had ever actually visited him, but she was listed there, along with her address. Interesting enough, but her singular status wasn’t what knocked my socks off. Isaac’s identification of her was. Under the heading of “relationship to inmate,” Isaac had written in impeccable block letters “SISTER.”

Noel had just gained another aunt.