EXCERPT FROM THE WORST OF THE WORST

“How old were you when someone first placed a gun in your hand?”

It was a question I had asked each murder defendant, at some point, as we talked through the prison’s glass-and-chicken-wire barrier separating us in the closet-sized interview cubicle. On this day, two sour-looking white men stood guard, one on each side of the glass wall, with tattooed arms crossed over their chests. Like fierce toy soldiers in their dark gray uniforms, they were adorned with side arms, handcuffs, and rings with chains of key cards hanging from their belts. Even amid bursts of scratchy squawking over loud speakers, one was talking into his shoulder-mounted walkie-talkie, and I could imagine thought bubbles saying “I hate these defense people,” “Women don’t belong here,” or “He’s so tooling this poor lady.”

How galling—but then I could not afford to indulge those feelings. I had a job to do and not much time to do it. If the guards were standing this close and were that attentive, I suspected they were trying to listen in. Probably trying to get in good with the prosecutors; more likely, though, just everyday intimidation.

This time on the other side of the glass was Andrew Henry, a thirty-four-year-old African-American man, waiting to be tried for capital murder in the stabbing deaths of a female acquaintance and her seven-year-old son. We had been talking for about two hours when I asked my standard question. I was working for Andrew—well, technically, his attorney—so he was trying to help me understand him as much as he could. But he paused at my request.

“I never thought about that.” He looked away for a moment. The overhead squawking had become background noise.

I heard his metal cuff attached to a chain in a hole in the metal platform drag across it and just then caught his left hand dropping out of sight. His right hand held the battered black phone receiver. A bright orange jumpsuit framed the dark complexion of his face and arms, and together, those colors telegraphed so much of Andrew’s story. Mindful of the burly frame he carried around, I pictured what it must have been like to spend the last year-and-a half in his six-foot-by-nine-foot county cell.

During my lengthy, invasive questioning, many barely perceptible grunts and sighs spilled out of him in describing life with his wild, gun-toting mother. I had had to drag some things out, things I knew from other interviews I had conducted and from the many reports located in his foot-high paper case file. Andrew knew I would ask about difficult facts, so, after a few moments searching his memory about his first gun, he just said it.

“I was about twelve.” He still was not looking at me; I could hear his thumb clicking at a loose part on his one handcuff. “My mother gave me her gun, the one she always carried in her purse, because she was getting a better one. She said it was time I took up for myself.” His records revealed his mother, Janean, had also given him a knife when he was ten years old and told him to “hurt that kid who beat you up” earlier that day. Andrew had been too frightened to use the knife, so he made-up a reason why he had not had to use it after all.

I could not help but connect the third-grader’s mother having given him a knife to take care of his schoolyard business with the thirty-three-year-old Andrew, slaying the victim and her seven-year-old son with one. But, then, I never would grow accustomed to thinking about the victims’ horrible deaths.

Over several years, I worked as an expert witness for the defense in the punishment phase of death penalty cases; our defendant would have already been found guilty of the crime. On the surface, my job was to help convince a jury not to choose execution for my defendants. We hoped they would choose life with the possibility of parole, “life without,” as we referred to it.

But the truth is, to do that job, it was up to the expert witness to work a kind of magic, explaining how a person—this particular person—could go from an innocent child to the point where he committed such a wretched crime as to merit the death penalty. The kind of crime Andrew Henry committed. That is what jurors really wanted to know. The “why.” And another truth is, if I could really, absolutely do that, I would not still be an average person with a mortgage and a car payment. I would have been a wealthy genius, a regular Nobel Prize winner.

No one has developed the algorithm to precisely predict or explain capital murder.

ANDREW HENRY’S LIFE—BEFORE