Smashing open his head as a child may have set Stan Faulder on a path of depression, alcoholism, and, in one brief spasm, murder. He now sits on death row because successive Texas juries, unaware of his injury, say he’ll murder again.
By Ivor Shapiro
Published in Saturday Night magazine, March 1993
NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS THE AUTHOR’S UNEDITED FINAL DRAFT. FACTS HAVE NOT BEEN DOUBLE-CHECKED, AND CHANGES WERE MADE IN THE EDITING PROCESS BEFORE PUBLICATION.
Like most three-year-olds, little Stanley Faulder was impossible to imagine as a future murderer. Five decades later, his sister keeps a fading picture of him framed on her dining-room sideboard. It shows a cute snub-shouldered kid with a shock of brown hair, plump cheeks and a winsome smile standing in a dusty street in McLennan, Alberta, and holding, of all things, a bunch of sweet peas.
Today, Pat’s kid brother is on Death Row in Huntsville, Texas, for bludgeoning and stabbing an old woman to death. There is only one possible explanation, Pat says: something is wrong with Stan’s brain.
If so, the story begins with a car accident. It happened in 1941 on a country road near McLennan, where Joe Faulder, a locomotive foreman of thirty-nine, had been posted by Northern Alberta Railways. His wife, Ellen, was thirty-six, a former Edmonton legal secretary; they had three kids, Stan (who was nearly four), Pat (ten), and Barry (thirteen). In the back seat of the family’s Hudson, Stan must have been fiddling with a door handle when the car rounded a curve and the door opened, sending him tumbling onto the road. His head bounced and smashed against the low-slung rear-hinged door. Ellen wrapped her unconscious son’s bleeding head in diapers and drove him to hospital. Five scary days later, Stan came home, seemingly recovered.
But he had changed. A quiet kid capable of spending hours with his Meccano set on the front room floor had been replaced by a speedier model, who tobogganed recklessly, raced up trees, and charged about the house. None of which would have been disturbing in a boy of four had there not been other changes, too, such as Stan’s “spells.” Amidst some manic activity, he might lapse into a white-faced blank-eyed daze for up to an hour. Asked what was wrong, he would shake his head and say, “I don’t know.” Or, he would fall into a deep sleep, to rouse him from which everyone took turns shaking him and walking him around the house.
Then, there was the stealing. From age six, Stan was, according to an RCMP juvenile-crime report, “constantly admitting petty thefts from his parents and friends” and being suspected of others in town. In his sister’s mind, Stan’s “spells” and his thefts are closely connected. In the earliest theft story she remembers, Stan returned in a daze from a visit to his Aunt Ellen; when the aunt telephoned about a five-dollar bill missing from her purse, Pat found it in the boy’s pocket. Afterward, he took to bed and slept all day and night. And as Pat remembers it, the first time the police came to the house about a theft, the family was busy walking Stan in one of those epic attempts to wake him.
It is possible that time, and affection, have melded separate memories for Pat. Stan himself, when he was a twenty-three-year-old penitentiary inmate in New Westminster, B.C., wrote an agonizingly honest eleven-page self-examination which offers a different version of his first clash with the law. He was eight, the family was living in Edmonton, and he had stolen a set of cap-guns from Woolworths on a dare. “After a lecture from the city police, [I] was returned home to my parents,” he wrote, making no mention of dazes or dozing.
But then, the boy always did refuse to talk about his “spells.” Throughout his life, when his mother or sister raised the possibility of brain damage, he refused to listen.
What Stan’s notes do recall is the aftermath of that first theft: he became “the centre of attraction,” receiving “lectures from the entire family.” Ellen Faulder felt sure her son’s conduct stemmed from the accident. She took him to neurologist Howard Hepburn, who administered tests including electro-encephalograms. Afterward, Ellen announced a diagnosis of “mental blackouts” during which Stan had no control over his actions.
Doctor Hepburn is dead and his files long destroyed, but even at this distance it seems clear something odd was going on inside Stan’s head. One sign: his school records show his IQ in Grade One as 99; three years later, the quotient is 116. Last year, it was measured again, this time at a near-genius level of 130. The Oklahoma-based neuropsychologist who made the latest measurement, Philip J. Murphy, testifying at a habeas corpus hearing in Texas, said such large IQ increases are rare, and indicate the brain is struggling to compensate for damage.
One of those who filed affidavits in support of that habeas application last Spring was Stan’s Grade Six teacher, Dora Doyle. She described him as a “sunshiny” well-groomed child, but a slow learner whose mind easily strayed. This was the besetting irony of Stan Faulder’s life: if IQ means anything, he was bright and getting brighter; he knew he was capable of success. But he couldn’t focus his thoughts.
When Stan was ten, the family settled in Jasper, where his dad took a share in a pool hall cum gift shop cum barber’s. Joe Faulder was a hard-drinking man who was, Pat says, a “funny” drunk, rather than the violent kind. He was closer to Pat and Barry, who were old enough to help with house renovations, than to his mama’s-darling younger son with the disturbing ways.
Adolescence seems to have raised the volume of Stan’s mental tumult. His school grades, formerly an unremarkable mix of A’s and B’s, began to embrace a rising number of C’s and D’s. And the “spells” continued. School buddy Allen Clarke, now an Edmonton realtor, says Stan would “just black out sometimes.” Once, in a Grade Nine shop class, his head slumped over his drafting table and the teacher, thinking he was feigning sleep, “rapped him on the head and knocked him off his stool.” But Stan’s school record for that year includes nothing about passing out–just a brief, unsigned, note: “Ambition: don’t know.”
Frustrated with academic failure, Stan sought alternative ways to be the “centre of attraction.” One night, he got into a government compound and drove a truck around, doing “a fair amount of damage,” as he would recall in his New Westminster journal, merely because it was “a feat that took daring.” For this offence, he was, at age fourteen, fined five dollars plus costs, and ordered to be off the streets by 9 p.m. His father had a few drinks, sobbed for shame and took a belt to Stan. When a welt rose on the boy’s thighs, Ellen called a halt.
Among the kids he failed to outshine in class, such escapades garnered Stan new respect and, as he admitted in the New Westminster journal, “after that, I would do almost anything either legal or illegal that was a little bit daring.” He quit school at the end of Grade Nine and spent half a year doing casual labourer’s jobs until he was arrested again, for stealing a watch from a local bunkhouse, and sentenced to six months in a home for boys. RCMP Constable R.N.W. Pyper filed a report detailing the boy’s puzzling history, and concluding that the family was probably right to blame “a brain injury of some sort.”
When sixteen-year-old Stan returned from the home, he proceeded to fail the tenth grade and afterward, mainly hung around his dad’s pool hall for a while. His brother Barry’s young bride Gerry remembers a pleasant young man who was forever whistling bird imitations or the latest Elvis number. But Stan’s wild aspect was flourishing, too. He discovered (as he would write in New Westminster) that he could “whip any one of the kids in a fight”–and that his blue eyes, easy smile and restless daring attracted girls with whom to explore adult pleasures.
In May, 1955, he was arrested for another minor theft and spent six months in Fort Saskatchewan prison. Soon after his release, he and a friend went out drinking and embarked on a wild adventure. It began with a brawl in an Edmonton cafe, and embraced a journey to Toronto and back to Brandon, Manitoba, in five successive stolen cars. It ended–not before the pair had run two police roadblocks and dodged a few bullets–in Stoney Mountain Penitentiary. Stan’s two years there were marked by two injuries to his left hand on machines in the prison shop, and a warden’s log describing him as “moody” and “unpredictable.”
While in prison, he taught himself to play a guitar his mom had sent him, which later became “an honest way of being the centre of attraction.” Jasper folk still smile when they remember summer wiener roasts when Stan sang ballads while couples necked, late twilight dripped silver over Pyramid Lake and Mount Pyramid’s rust flecks turned black against the bright western sky.
But Stan’s restlessness was still with him. His buddy Bernie Worsfold remembers him driving a ’54 Monarch to the top of a narrow mountain track just to prove it could be done.
“So, how ya gonna get her down?” the gang taunted.
“Back her down, no big chore,” Stan grinned, and so, he did. Another time, when a bunch of tough guys sought to crash a private party, Faulder walked up, pointed at the floor, and said quietly: “You step across this line, and that’s it.” One youth stepped forward, quite a bit taller than thick-set Stan’s five-foot-seven. “Stan kinda poked him in the jaw,” says Worsfold, “and it was lights out.”
In the fall of 1959, at the age of twenty-two, Stan drifted away from Jasper in search of new prospects. The next September, he was arrested in Cranbrook, B.C., for another theft. He served thirty days and, within a week of his release, was caught in a stolen car and pulled three years in New Westminster.
The scars listed on his admission papers there include not just the old head wounds, but signs of injury to his left knee, left arm and left shoulder blade–a pattern that contributed to neuropsychologist Murphy’s diagnosis of damage to the right hemisphere of Faulder’s cerebral cortex.
Ellen Faulder wrote to the prison warden to draw his attention to her son’s head injury and request psychiatric attention. She concluded: “We are at our wits’ end…. But I am very sure he is more to be pitied than condemned and it is heartbreaking to see him making a ruin of his life.”
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Perhaps the most surprising development in Faulder’s career came now, at age 23, in the New Westminster pen. In March of his first year, he asked for psychiatric help and volunteered for some kind of experimental treatment involving the stimulant Methedrine. It was while on this drug’s high that Faulder mulled in script over the ruins of his adolescence, and blamed his grandiose need to be “the centre of attraction.” Concluding that it was time to reduce expectations, he bade a dramatic goodbye to “the strongman, the daredevil, the Don Juan of yesteryear,” and resolved to be content with some “small role in this world of ours.”
This could easily be dismissed as a sociopathic young man’s attempt to manipulate an early parole, were it not for the changes in behaviour that followed. In prison, Faulder ploughed through courses in radio, mathematics and electricity; when he returned to Jasper in 1962, there were no more thefts. He worked at the Jasper Park Lodge for a while, then joined a road crew as a heavy equipment driver. In spare time, he worked miracles on old cars. He was a natural mechanic, and strong–once, Bernie Worsfold watched him manhandle a V6 engine out of a Monarch.
He continued to serenade at parties, and at one of them, in the summer of 1963, he caught the eye of a twenty-three-year-old registered nurse from Calgary named Lorraine Spencer. One thing led to another and three months later, the two married in a quiet ceremony in the United Church in Hinton. Early next year, Camille Joanne–“Cami-Jo” to her delighted dad–was born.
Among the marriage’s earliest problems, according to a letter Faulder wrote just last year to Cami-Jo, was his tendency to be “impossibly jealous.” Seeing Lorraine talking to other men would enrage him, and they would yell at each other for hours. Both husband and wife refuse to talk to the press, but letters he has written, and the memories of friends and family, testify to another thorn in the marital side: Faulder’s restless inability to stick at a job.
He did secure his ticket as a heavy-duty mechanic at the Hinton pulp mill in 1966, but the family immediately moved to Edmonton, where he went from job to job (and where Cami-Jo’s sister Krista was born). Two moves and two years later, the Faulders settled across the Rockies in Kamloops, B.C. Lorraine’s nursing paid the rent; Stan looked after the kids, found broken-down cars to fix, and earned bits of cash, now as an auto mechanic, now repairing eight-track stereos–a craft he taught himself after getting the job by lying about his experience.
To Lorraine’s complaints about his lack of prospects, Stan would say, “Things will get better.” But money was always tight. Stan drank quantities of Smirnoff and 7-Up, played poker for hours, and developed his pool-hustling routine: challenging a stranger for five dollars, losing, upping the ante and losing again before showing his stuff at redoubled stakes.Occasionally, Stan, Lorraine and the girls would drive up to Jasper for Faulder gatherings, in which Stan was an increasingly uncomfortable participant. He squirmed visibly while Barry and Pat compared notes–Barry was a CN engineer, Pat was happily married to Bill Nicholl, head gardener at the Lodge. “I knew he felt inferior,” says Pat Nicholl, “but what could you do about that?” The happiest times were at home with Cami-Jo and Krista, rolling on the floor with them or singing them to sleep. Cami-Jo, now a grade-school teacher in Victoria, B.C., loved to “help” her dad repair cars in the front yard–which meant occasionally fetching a wrench and mainly asking questions while perched on the air filter. Faulder seemed almost to have found his “small role in this world”, but he was mired in debt, and still making no apparent effort to get a steady job.
Then, early in 1970, Lorraine left. Stan helped her move to Cranbrook with the kids, and after a short bout with near-suicidal depression, seemingly accepted Lorraine’s move as a challenge to sort himself out. He took a job at the Bethlehem Steel mine near Ashcroft, four hours’ drive west of Cranbrook.
In a succession of letters to Jasper that year, Faulder gave intricate details of his finances, thanked his parents for small loans, and assured them he was off the booze and would earn his wife’s respect again. “As soon as things are settled one way or the other between Lorraine and me,” he wrote, “I am going to be able to do everything you have always wanted me to do….” He worked conscientiously for a year, passing some money on to Lorraine and paying off some debts, but by early 1971, it was clear his marriage was dead. He quit his job and hit the road.
At this point, the story assumes a profound inevitability. Faulder wandered northern B.C., taking temporary jobs in logging camps and drinking heavily. His family’s disappointment in him was palpable when he brought the kids to Jasper for Christmas, 1972, and, although neither knew it, when Faulder and his mother kissed goodbye a few days later, it was for the last time.
He spent New Year’s in Cranbrook with his girls, then eight and six, and passed most of the day singing with them. He was teaching them the current hit:
My, my, my, Delilah
Why, why, why, Delilah…?
Faulder was harbouring a fury toward his wife, who was, he now felt sure, seeing other men. But neither then nor in later years did Cami-Jo see significance in the song they were belting out–
…I saw the flickering
shadows of love on her blind.
She was my woman….
For seventeen years, Cami-Jo would treasure this memory, her dad cradling her behind his guitar as they laughed and sang:
…She stood there laughing.
I saw the knife in my hands,
and she laughed no more.
My, my, my….
Last year, when contact was re-established, Stan Faulder wrote Cami-Jo to explain what happened next: “I was afraid that I might do serious bodily harm to your mother, and I ran away. I hit the booze hard, and even got into drugs to some degree…. To say I was totally screwed up would be to put it mildly.” There were no more phone calls, no letters, no support payments. He got a job at a garage in Vancouver, where he told fellow-workers he had been in jail for safe-cracking–a flat-out lie which gained him cachet. But when the boss told him to stop using customers’ cars overnight, Faulder got sullen. “Well, if you’re gonna start criticising me, I guess I’ll move on,” he said, and so, he did.
#
What used to be called the Hurricane Club is a cement-floored windowless saloon on the outskirts of Longview, an oil town in north-east Texas. Stan Faulder was drinking beer and hustling pool there one summer night in 1975, having spent a year roaming the south-western U.S. He would have moved on again, once he became known amongst the local pool shooters, had it not been for the appearance at the Hurricane that night of a certain bikers’ gang woman who wore the minimum of clothing and a swastika tattoo on one hand. Her name was Lynda “Stormy” Summers.
Her main man was one Ernest McCann, but Ernie was off with the gang on the June night when Stormy walked in with another guy, a some-time carpet-layer named James Moulton. According to trial testimony, Stan Faulder was watching slim guys with high boots and big-buckled belts stroking their cues when Stormy waved, and he drew up a chair. Moulton didn’t like this stranger, muscling in on his date, going on about being some kind of safe cracker. “Yeah, well, I know a safe you can crack,” Moulton jeered, while everyone bit into beers and the jukebox blared bluegrass, the smoke so thick you didn’t know you weren’t seeing straight. “What safe?” someone said, so Moulton told about this house where he’d laid a carpet; rich old dame lived there all alone; old man, oil tycoon type, kicked off after starting renovations; safe buried in the floor. So, when the club closed, they all went to check out the house, drove for twenty minutes east through the wet heat to Gladewater; little horse-shit town with its annual rodeo; cased this big white bungalow on North Main, fancy lattice work on the porch; drove back to Longview.
On Tuesday night, July 8, 1975, Faulder and Stormy, having become something of an item in the intervening days, returned to Gladewater. Whose idea this was, is open to dispute; so are the details of what went down. Maybe the Canadian “safe cracker” figured he really could get into the box, same way he’d muddled through eight-tracks, no big chore, impress the hell out of Stormy. Anyway, they drove down there after they’d had a few; packed a blackjack and a gun; Stormy knocked at the back door.
To Stan Faulder, standing back in semi-darkness, the seventy-five-year-old woman who peered out must have looked uncannily like his mother–same flattish nose, same firm jaw, same thin lips. Stormy said their car was broken down, and Inez Phillips let them in to use the phone. They showed her the gun, and she told them where the safe was, and gave them the combination, and Faulder went to open it, finding it empty. Then, he heard a shot. The old woman and Stormy were in the bedroom, struggling for the gun.
And so, he hit the old woman who looked like his mother, who was now perversely blocking his path, preventing him (as he may, perhaps, have seen it in that instant) from going home laden with jewels, the “centre of attraction”; he hit her head with his blackjack, and when she fell, bleeding and groaning, he went to the kitchen and found a knife, and thrust it into her heart.
Inez Phillips’s body was found by a maid the next morning, and her son Jack offered a $50,000 reward for information. James Moulton called to finger both Stormy Summers and Stan, whose last name he didn’t know. When the Texas Rangers caught up with Stormy and charged her with murder, she provided the full name.
He had hung around Longview for a couple of months before hitch-hiking west, aimless. The Colorado Highway Patrol picked him up in the Spring of 1977, and sent him back to Longview, where the Texas officers read him his rights. He said he wanted a lawyer; they nodded politely and went right on interrogating him. When he had signed a full confession, they arraigned him, and then he got his lawyer.
The court-appointed attorney, Vernard G. Solomon, had never handled a capital case, but he knew what a tainted confession looked like, and, after losing a battle to keep the jury from hearing it, set his sights on an appeal. With Faulder convicted of capital murder, the trial moved into the punishment phase. Texas law required the jury to answer three yes-or-no questions: Was the murder deliberate? Was it unprovoked? And, was the killer likely to endanger society again? A unanimous “yes” to all three “special-interest” questions would invoke the death penalty.
In Faulder’s case, the only half-tough question was the one calling for a prediction of future dangerousness. The Phillips killing was, after all, the first and only violent crime on his record. Prosecutor Odis Hill produced two psychiatrists who had examined the accused for one and a half hours and now certified that he would kill again. One of these was a veteran provider of such testimony. His name is James Grigson, but the lawyers call him “Doctor Death.”
Grigson testified that Faulder had “a sociopathic personality disorder.” This was not an illness, he explained. It “simply” described “an individual that has certain characteristics. Foremost is the absence of conscience.” Faulder was, in fact, “at the very extreme of your extremely severe sociopath,” and would never change.
Vernard Solomon filled eighty-three pages of transcript in a vain battle to get Grigson to admit that his diagnosis and prediction were something less than objective fact. Before sitting down, Solomon took out a coin and tried a lawyer’s trick. “Doctor,” he asked, flipping the coin, “you testified in regard to probability. What’s the probability that’s heads?”
But Grigson knew lawyers’ tricks, and he knew jurors. “Well, it’s fifty per cent,” he agreed pleasantly, “whereas what I was predicting is a hundred per cent.”
“You want to bet this man’s life on it that that’s heads?”
“No, I’m betting other–innocent–people’s lives on it.”
On November 9, 1977, the twelve jurors said “yes” three times, and Stan Faulder was sentenced to death.
#
Back in the Canadian Rockies, his family still had no idea where he was. He had asked Solomon not to contact them, feeling sure the murder charge must have made the papers back there (it didn’t) and that if they had not got in touch, they didn’t want to be involved. When Joe Faulder died, in 1978, he had long presumed his younger son dead.
In the prison at Huntsville, Stan Faulder’s mind was now much occupied with life after death. He had, like many in his position, been seduced by a forgiving Christ, and between reading the Bible, he wrote dozens of poems. These consist mainly of colourless old-time religion but occasionally offer glimpses into the clutter of his mind:
Whirling and spinning, focusing and fading
The images dance in my mind….
Hell is doubt, despair, uncertainty
It is also pain and sorrow
It is living in confusion…
It is the ache that burns inside you
Over goals you’ve failed to reach….
In 1979, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals threw out Faulder’s confession and ordered a new trial, which duly took place in 1981. Jack Phillips, determined to get his vengeance this time, paid the fee of the determined lead prosecutor, Odis Hill (who had gone into private practice) and hired a prominent Dallas attorney to assist. But most important, it was Phillips’s money that secured new evidence to replace the disallowed confession in placing Faulder at the crime scene.
Lynda McCann, a.k.a. Stormy Summers, had been in jail for four years. She had copped a plea on conspiracy to commit burglary and now, she struck a new deal with Hill, agreeing to testify against Faulder in return for being released on probation. From Jack Phillips, she would receive $10,000 in “relocation expenses” in order to take up residence in another state–she was, she said, afraid of Faulder.
McCann had a rose tattooed over her swastika and told the jury a tale in which the robbery was all Faulder’s idea and he forced her to go along. She herself had such distaste for violence that she placed the gun on a bedside table, and it went off when the widow grabbed it. After Faulder clubbed the old woman, he tied her up (“My God, Stan, don’t hurt her”, McCann cried) before stabbing her. Ex-biker Ernie McCann, Stormy’s current husband showed up to corroborate his wife’s story and echo her horror. His fee: $2,000 from the reward fund.
As in the first trial, Faulder declined to dispute his guilt. To his lawyer’s passionate attack on the way the McCanns’ evidence had been procured, prosecutor Hill responded: “If Mr Solomon wants to accuse me of going to hell to get these witnesses, I will confess to it…. If that’s the only way the fabric of justice can once again be made whole, then I will make that trip.” Fair enough, the jury said, and moved on to consider Texas’s three “special-interest” questions.
This time, Hill produced three psychiatrists to certify Faulder’s future dangerousness, only one of whom–“Doctor Death” Grigson–had ever met him. That was OK, because the Supreme Court had, earlier that year, ruled that using the fruits of a psychiatric exam for prosecution evidence violated the Fifth Amendment guarantee against self-incrimination. Instead, each doctor now rendered his diagnosis after being asked a “hypothetical” question–a detailed but anonymous description of the evidence at trial. Each duly replied that the perpetrator described therein fitted the profile of a criminal with an antisocial personality disorder.
This is not to be mistaken for a diagnosis of mental illness such as schizophrenia or dementia. A personality disorder is formally defined as an assembly of “inflexible and maladaptive” traits. People with these disorders fully control, and understand, their actions. All they lack is the will to live by society’s norms.
So, a diagnosis of sociopathy tells the jury that the convicted person is dangerous, and knows it, and likes it, and, because there is no known treatment, will never change. Leaders of the American Psychiatric Association have condemned the rendering of so devastating a diagnosis on the basis of a hypothetical true-crime story. But Faulder’s jury heard only from the doctors of death. It sent him back to Death Row.
There he still lives, eleven years later, one of 367 in Huntsville who await dates with the lethal injection. At fifty-five, he looks like an exhausted prize fighter, with crew-cut grey hair, drooping chin, strong chest and thickening waist. In his six-by-nine-foot cell, he fixes other prisoners’ radios, free of charge, and uses nail clippers and glue to construct domino boxes and clock frames from popsicle sticks. He no longer prays much, having failed to “get the answers I wanted from God.”
A former inmate describes him as “the most intelligent man on Death Row.” Faulder seems to cope better with prison life–highly structured, always predictable–than he ever did with the world outside. The prison logs record no outbursts of rage from him, three minor rule breaches, and one strange incident. In February, 1987, guards had great difficulty rousing him from sleep, in what seems to have been his only recorded mental blackout as an adult.
In 1991, having exhausted all the avenues he knew for appeal, Vernard Solomon turned for help to the Texas Resource Centre, a federally funded group of capital appeals lawyers established in 1988. Assigned to the case was Sandra Babcock, a twenty-seven-year-old recent Harvard law school graduate with an annual salary of $28,500, a fierce revulsion for the death penalty, and a belief that “there is no such thing as an evil person–that’s a B-movie concept”.
Babcock decided to track down her client’s family in Canada in search of new facts. On November 1, 1991, she placed a call to the Pine Grove nursing home in Jasper, where eighty-seven-year-old Ellen Faulder now lived. Pat Nicholl, the home’s manager, answered the phone. It was Nicholl who, minutes later, told Babcock what had happened on the road to McLennan, when her brother Stan was three.
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The habeas application lodged with state judge Gary Stevens in 1992 cited three main violations of Faulder’s rights. Under international law, the Canadian consul in Dallas should have been notified of Faulder’s arrest–something that was never done. (This omission provoked a diplomatic protest from Ottawa last year, which the State Department has asked the Texas State Attorney to investigate.) Under the heading of Faulder’s right to a fair trial, Babcock alleged unlawful participation by private prosecutors, and, perhaps most important, “ineffective assistance” by trial counsel Vernard Solomon, who had, despite working hard on the case for over a decade, failed to introduce vital mitigating evidence–namely, Faulder’s brain injury.
Faulder had never mentioned the possibility that he was not “normal,” but if Solomon had merely called his client’s mother, or requested Canadian prison and police records, he would soon have been reading Mountie Pyper’s report and Ellen Faulder’s letter to the warden at New Westminster. With these documents in hand, Babcock called in neuropsychologist Philip Murphy, as well as a Charlotte, N.C., forensic clinical psychologist named Faye Sultan, to examine her client.
Last July, the two specialists, joined by Faulder’s former lawyer and selected family members and friends, testified at a one-day hearing convened by Judge Stevens in Longview. The hearing’s purpose: to consider whether new evidence of mitigating circumstances should be heard by a jury in order to review Faulder’s death sentence.
Sultan portrayed Faulder as a highly intelligent but chronically depressed man, tormented by “the sense that he had never accomplished anything of significance, except perhaps the birth of his two daughters.” As to the reason this might be so, Faulder had refused to discuss head injury as a possibility. He had told Sultan that “his mother had used it as an explanation for all of his failures, and that he didn’t consider it an explanation or an excuse for any of his behaviour at all.”
But head injury was where Murphy came in. Seeking to identify how well each part of Faulder’s brain was functioning, Murphy had tested fine motor control and responses to sensory stimuli, and used batteries of questions to probe cognitive abilities. One questionnaire revealed that Faulder had surprising difficulty–given an IQ of 130–in distinguishing categories of objects. And a test of Faulder’s auditory response indicated that while each ear could hear well, only the right ear responded when both were stimulated together. From these two findings, together with Faulder’s history of left-side injuries, Murphy inferred damage to the right temporal lobe of the cerebral cortex. He considered the family stories of young Stan’s waking-sleep episodes to be descriptions of temporal lobe seizures, probably caused by overstimulation in the hippocampus. The hippocampus plays quarterback in the brain’s limbic system, which provides emotional context for cerebral information.
Murphy told the judge that temporal-hippocampal damage could cause major lapses in judgment. Information is comprehended in the cortex, but given emotional value in the limbic system. People with hippocampal problems are prone to fail, at critical moments, to inhibit their impulses, Murphy said, and are thus susceptible to uncontrollable bursts of violent rage. Stress or alcohol could, he added, trigger such episodes.
In his cross-examination, assistant district attorney Clement Dunn politely made it clear that he didn’t think much of this new evidence. Murphy had produced no physical proof of brain damage, and the diagnosis relied partly on Faulder’s failures of judgment, which were not in dispute–quite the contrary. Yet, no-one was quarrelling with the fact that little Stan had fallen from a car and smashed his head open. Therefore, scans for brain lesions, and more sophisticated scans that map the brain at work, would surely have revealed some damage. But then, what? The science of mapping the effect of brain lesions or faulty synapses is far from refined, so even the latest and costliest scans cannot pinpoint a biological cause for murder.
Late last November, Judge Stevens rejected the habeas application, and, when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused to hear an appeal, Faulder was moved to the deathwatch holding cell and had phone calls with his family. He was scheduled to die on December 4. But Babcock, meanwhile, had lodged her petition in the U.S. District Court and, on December 3, the federal court issued a stay of execution until it had heard the appeal.
So, the condemned man is back in his usual cell on death Row. And, if the appeal efforts achieve nothing else, at least they have re-established his ties to family and old friends. In letters, he has battled to express the most intimate feelings, long buried and only partly apprehended. From the Death Row pay phone, he talked with his mother for three minutes on the night before she died last May, and they told each other, again and again, “I love you.” With tears streaming down his cheeks, he sat in the Longview courtroom listening to his daughter, sister and old friends recall a gentler, long-forgotten version of himself. And later, through a plexiglass screen in the Huntsville prison, he gazed at the dimples in Cami-Jo’s pink cheeks, unchanged by nineteen years. Although neither Krista nor Lorraine has forgiven his disappearance, Faulder has said that whatever becomes of him, the past few months have been the happiest in his life.
In all this–all the conversations and letter–he has never sought to account for, or excuse in any way, his killing of the widow Phillips. It is simply a given: the “mess” he got into. In fact, he has only once in eighteen years gone beyond the barest recital of the facts of that night–he used the blackjack, went to the kitchen and got a knife, and so forth–and that was in his private examination by the two psychiatrists who certified at his first trial that he would kill again. It’s not much, but in the running memorandum made by one of them at the time Faulder is quoted as saying, “Nothing went right in the whole thing…. he woman of the house was not supposed to be there…. The woman put up a big fight…. I had to hit her and I hit her too hard…. I was disappointed that there was nothing in the safe.” And he was quoted as saying he was “panicky and fired up” and he didn’t know why he stabbed the woman except that “she was moaning and groaning and I knew that I had done damage to her…. thought I was putting her out of her misery.” Later in same paragraph, there is another scrap of raw emotion: “In my case, it wouldn’t be easy to kill again…. you got to like something to want to do it again and I didn’t like that.”
Babcock’s petition could ultimately be referred to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the great state of Texas will most likely kill Stan Faulder in the end. He has, after all, never denied killing Inez Phillips, and there is only a slim chance that a new jury would deliver different answers to the three “special interest” questions. Such a jury could even decide that the evidence of brain injury merely adds to the likelihood that Faulder is a permanent menace. So, he will probably die, and afterward, the only questions that remain will be those too artless for courts to decide–questions like: what did turn a nice kid clutching sweet peas into a killer? And: When Stan Faulder walked in on the two struggling women in that Gladewater bedroom, was he wholly responsible for what happened next, or was he, almost as much as Inez Phillips, the victim of forces stronger than him? For the courts, charged with keeping order in the streets and in the collective consciousness, questions are resolved, and must be resolved, in the most mechanical way: yes or no, this or that. Criminal or casualty, bad or sick; close the case.
Yet, life is harder, and human stories more layered, than the taxonomies of law (and science) can grasp. Criminal “or” casualty–could there not be ingredients of both? Before there were criminologists, psychologists and neurologists, people spoke not of traits and disorders, psychoses and synapses, but of demons. Seen in that old-fashioned way, the story of Stan Faulder’s first thirty-eight years would be told as a battle for his soul. The demons threw him out of a car, killed some brain cells, rejuvenated others, left him with high intelligence bubbling in a porridge of jumbled thoughts and conflicted emotions. The demons added some fiery psychological seasoning–distant father, adoring mother, successful elder siblings, circumscribed prospects. They rushed him into an ill-conceived marriage. Through his father’s example, they lured him toward the bottle, a handy anaesthetic that seemed to lift his spirits and quell the storm inside his head even as it ate away at his threadbare judgment. They stood him face-to-face with self-disappointment and a lifetime of chronic depression.
By itself, each assault might have been fought off, but life is not either-or. It is and and and and and.
When Stan Faulder was 19, dodging bullets and running roadblocks, the demons sniffed victory.
At 23, after writing himself a pitiless letter in the New Westminster Pen., he rallied and, for a while, held some sort of line.
Twelve years later, on a New Year’s Day in Cranbrook, B.C., the demons threw themselves at him full strength, and won a decisive battle.
Three years after that, in a lonely old woman’s house in Gladewater, Texas, they won the war.