Horrific events force us to channel the resulting anger into a visible, tangible object, one that visibly articulates our rage and anger by its existence, at times, regardless of whether or not the object of our antipathy is directly related to its cause. A case in point would be Johnny Frank Garrett, a Texas man accused of rape and murder in 1981, who was convicted through apathy and pragmatism and executed via lethal injection despite a lack of evidence and overwhelming bungling of his defense.
On October 31, 1981, 76 year old Sister Tadea Benz was raped, mutilated and murdered in her bedroom at St. Francis Convent in Amarillo, Texas, leading the town to call for blood with a “lynch mob anger” urging all to “light the torches and go ahead and storm the castle.” Admittedly, the despicable murder begs the question that some individual “did what? … killed a nun … in her place?” If you stand on the side of capital punishment, a severe penalty needs to be meted out. At the same time, this crime became more of a spectacle for the politicians of Amarillo and exposed the dangers of religious extremism. In combination, these two facets compelled law enforcement to find a suspect whose absence would be of little detriment to society while giving a form to the evil that took Benz’s life.
As former homicide detective Claude Stephens notes, “the police department was under a lot of pressure because the community was concerned,” and they had cause inasmuch as a similar crime had taken place shortly before, one in which another older woman was raped and mutilated in nearly the same manner, with a white t-shirt left at both scenes and the same finger prints and black, curly hair found in the old women’s mouths and around the bed. While it is clear that the repetition of the crime kindles panic among the community, the pitchforks and torches were ubiquitously distributed by the rallying cries of newly elected District Attorney Danny Hill, a man who gained his position by “wrapping himself in the Old Testament,” and who had little concern that “he would have no problem rallying God’s army” in the Bible Belt community of Amarillo, allowing the search for Benz’s killer to transcend responsible, by-the-book police work into what a local newspaper called a search for a murderer who was “waging an all-out war against God,” leading a “community hell-bent on a modern day witch trial” to its sacrificial lamb:
Johnny Frank Garrett, a “guy who had little to say for himself,” but who was “easy pickings” because he was known as “the crazy kid … the village idiot” who possessed an IQ under 70.
The Last Word examines and showcases the hunt, pillory, and execution of Garrett, who was dealt a rigged hand from the very beginning when prosecutors Bill Kolias and Phil Jordan – two attorneys who had no experience with capitol cases – were assigned to his defense, but neglected to bring any evidence to light that would surely cast a reasonable doubt: first and foremost being the lack of any physical evidence at the scene of the crime that linked Garrett to the murder. Instead, the trial became a spectacle with the first day focusing on the gruesome photographs of the murdered nun to evoke visceral reactions in the jury before delivering the flimsy evidence that connects Garret to the convent, but not to the Sister’s room: ½ of a fingerprint found on a chair, though the defense neglected to bring any witness forth (nun or otherwise) who would testify that Garrett had been in the convent on a previous day to help the Sisters move and rearrange furniture.
Honestly, the list of errors in this case is astounding, and to better understand the morbidly mordant comedy of errors that was this process, it’s best to check out the film and watch with mouth aghast, though you’ll need to adjust to the Unsolved Mystery-style narration and the sudden revelation of the cure of Johnny Frank Garret that is seemingly thrown in during the last few minutes – though it is very coincidentally eerie.
However, a larger issue at hand is the reason that Garrett was pinned with this crime: he is the first mate on a ship of fools, the boats in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that “conveyed their insane cargo from town to town” as a general means of extraditing bothersome citizens – the mad, the insane, the criminal, and the mentally challenged. This is not too far of a stretch considering that Fidel Castro continued to practice the same method in the early 1980s when he allowed numerous rafts replete with criminals and undesirables to leave the shores of Cuba and sail toward the United States, providing citizens with no known backgrounds to be baptized into a new country.
And if we look at the stigma surrounding Garrett and his existence as “easy pickings,” what’s to suggest that his mental handicap was seen as anything but a burden on society, one in which he could not hold a full-time job or contribute financially, rendering him an eventual burden of the state, or as Michel Foucault suggests in Madness and Civilization, someone who “was perceived on the social horizon of poverty, of incapacity for work, of inability to integrate with the group; the moment when madness began to rank among the problems of the city.” In other words, Garrett’s prior propensity toward anger and issues fitting in with society relegated him as “mad,” a connoted outsider whose value is supreme as a symbol of the consequences of transgression and crime, but not as a member of society.
In addition, Garrett’s value also lies in the hands of those of cheer for the spectacle inflicted upon and generated by the “other,” which is clearly illustrated by capital punishment supporters who chanted “Kill the freak. Remember the nun!” as his family exited the prison’s execution chamber. There is an interesting dichotomy illustrated in this chant in that the supporters are genuinely seeking justice for the loss of life; at the same time, they are disenfranchising Garrett through a pejorative that connotes “otherness,” something that, coincidentally enough, initially brought forth the false accusation and subsequent false conviction, exposing the chanters’ desensitization to the flaws in the legal system and blindness to the errors in the trial procedure that is supposed to ensure all citizens the right to due process, providing they do not embody nor are perceived as “problems of the city.” If, however, they do fit this state of “otherness,” then they are relegated as visual fodder where “madness is elevated to spectacle above the silence of the asylums, and becoming a public scandal for the general delight,” which can be found not only in the chanters who wait to castigate the extensions of Garrett (his family), but also in the execution chamber, or what more closely resembles a theater where the inmate is strapped to a gurney with his arms extended out from his sides as his body is on view for members of family, government, and the press who are separated from the chamber by a wall of glass that offers a physical blockade from the accused while allowing the visual spectacle of a death that has been disassociated and sterilized by the process and procedure that proceeds it, contradicting the stigma that murder exists in life’s most chaotic moments.
