There But for the Grace of God Go I by William Davie
Gordon Parks, Raiding Detectives, Chicago, Illinois, 1957 © Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation
The only thing more heinous than 6-year-old Jeremy Guillory’s murder, strangled to death by Rickey Langley in a rundown house near the small town of Iowa, Louisiana, on February 7, 1992, is how preventable it was.
But before Langley, there was Oscar Lee.
One of five children, Oscar Lee was the apple of his parents’ eye. In early 1964 he was decapitated in a horrific car accident as his family was relocating from California to Louisiana. Allegedly, his father, 24-year-old Alcide, was drunk and lost control of the car, crashing into a bridge at high speed. Vickie, Oscar Lee’s younger sister, the youngest child, was also killed in the crash. Their mother Bessie was thrown from the car upon impact and was only just clinging to life.
Bessie spent four days in a coma and remained in hospital for several weeks after. She continued to receive treatment but due to the extent of her injuries, she was confined to a full body cast that went from her neck down to her ankles. Alongside this, she was regularly X-rayed and put on an intensive drug treatment plan that included Atropine, Vistaril, Librium, Demerol, Morphine, Chloral Hydrate, Codeine, Dibex, Chloromycetrin, Phenobarbital, Fergan, Seconal, and Inferon, all while she continued to drink and smoke.
At one point, Bessie told staff at Charity Hospital that she was pregnant. They didn’t believe her. How could she be, they reasoned, she was in a full body cast. They continued to pump her full of drugs and x-ray her.
A few months later however, it became clear to everyone that Bessie was right. She was pregnant; now five months along.
Panicking, doctors told Bessie that she must have an abortion given what the foetus had been subjected to. Bessie agreed, but Alcide refused. He argued that because he was a staunch Catholic an abortion would go against his religious beliefs. Although it has been speculated that Alcide possibly saw this as an opportunity to replace Oscar Lee with a new son.
Much to the disbelief of the doctors and nurses, when her son was born, Ricky Joseph Langley, as Bessie named him, appeared perfectly healthy.
Because of his mother’s ongoing medical condition, Langley was raised by his aunt and uncle, Ronnie and Linda Coley. As he began to talk, he spoke with a stutter and with a speech impediment. Up to the age of 8 or 9-years-old, Langley only occasionally visited his mother and father, and when he did his father would tease him mercilessly. He would hold Langley up to the impossible bar set by Oscar Lee, taking every opportunity to humiliate him and remind him how he fell short of it.
When Langley was 10-years-old, he put a notice on his school noticeboard that read: “I am not Rickey Langley, I am Oscar Lee.” It was a manifestation of the nascent schizophrenia that would soon come to plague his existence. At times, Langley really did believe that he was Oscar Lee. At other times, he believed that Oscar Lee was his alter ego, a tormentor that would periodically possess him and force him to do things.
As he grew older, these grew more serious.
On June 30, 1984, Langley was arrested by the Allen Parish Sheriff's Office in Louisiana for molesting a 7-year-old boy. He pleaded guilty on May 23, 1985, and was sentenced to 30 months in prison, which was ultimately suspended. Instead, Langley was placed on active probation for three years.
Langley was arrested again on June 19, 1986. This time, in Indianapolis, Indiana, by the FBI. He was charged as a fugitive from the State of Georgia for the crime of sodomy and theft where, it was alleged, he molested a 6-year-old girl in Conyers, before stealing her mother’s car. The girl’s mother, it turned out, was his cousin.
On September 26, 1986, Langley pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to serve concurrent 10-year and 5-year sentences in the Georgia Department of Corrections.
While in prison, Langley received psychiatric evaluation and counselling. Experts quickly concluded, and told him, that he was both a paedophile and severely schizophrenic. They said that both were untreatable in his case. They hypothesised that if he were to be released, he would reoffend, even going so far as to outline a timeframe: it would likely take place within a year of his release and would almost certainly involve a child.
Upon hearing this Langley felt moved to write a letter to the State Board of Pardons and Paroles asking that he not be paroled. He begged to be kept in a secure psychiatric facility where he wouldn’t be a danger to anyone. He also took the opportunity to offer himself as a willing subject for studies to be carried out on in order to better understand why he was like this, so that future generations “can avoid another me.”
Langley’s letter was ignored. On June 25, 1990, he was paroled.
On February 7, 1992, Guillory knocked on the door of the Lawrence family house, a BB gun in his hand, he was looking for their son and daughter, Joy and Joey, to play with. Their lodger, Langley, answered the door.
That evening, with no sign of Guillory, his mother Lorelei reported him missing.
Three days later, his body was found wrapped in a blanket and propped up in a closet, his BB gun leaning against the wall next to him.
In the days leading up to Guillory’s murder, Langley was suffering from increasingly vivid bouts of psychosis. He had convinced himself that the only way to finally exorcise these demons for good was to kill Guillory. Tellingly, when Langley’s aunt was shown a photograph of Guillory and a photograph of Oscar Lee side-by-side she couldn’t tell them apart.
On July 9, 1994, Langley was convicted of first-degree murder, and subsequently sentenced to death.
After the sentencing, at the urging of Clive Stafford Smith who was now representing Langley, Lorelei met with him. She wanted to try and understand why her son had been murdered, while Langley wanted to apologise to her, and to try and explain to her as best he could, why he had done what he did.
Over the course of three hours, Langley apologised and explained his life story to her. Lorelei, a recovering alcoholic with very little education, became a hero to Stafford Smith that day, he later recalled, because she had the most immense compassion. She saw something that very few others could or were even willing to acknowledge was there.
Lorelei saw that her son’s murder was the unfair and tragic trajectory Langley's life was inevitably going to reach. She could never forgive him, and she agreed that he needed to be punished for what he did. However, she also saw that he was clearly and acutely mentally ill. He should have been kept in a secure psychiatric hospital as he had begged for years ago. In realising this, she quickly and vehemently came to the conclusion that he should not be on death row.
As their meeting ended, Lorelei stood up galvanized. Having only ever referred to him as Langley prior to this, she said: ‘Ricky, I’m going to fight for you!’
‘Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another,’ writes moral theologian Father James F. Keenan SJ in The Works of Mercy: The Heart of Catholicism (2005).
Lorelei’s ability to glean something other than pitch-black contempt from one of the darkest and cruellest twists of fate that life can take, the willingness to enter into the chaos of another, as Keenan says, holds a mirror up to us and asks if we could do the same? Could we set aside our judgment in order to try and find out why something happened, like she did? Could we be open-minded enough upon learning why something happened to recalibrate our thinking; a decision that would surely have seemed utterly implausible to Lorelei before she met with Langley?
The narrative of crime, particularly how and why it is presented as it is, is always at the forefront of our consciousness, whether we care to see it or not. In America especially, the death penalty stands as a crucifix-like symbol of an empire that has made a sport, a myth, and more recently, a business, out of the people who have violated the collective moral boundaries of its inhabitants.
A deep and fascinating parallel to Keenan’s proclamation and Lorelei’s actions can be found in the modus operandi of photographer Gordon Parks, who once described his photographic work during an interview with David Hoffman as ‘the need to expose something that I thought was being hidden. It’s not courage, it’s a need to get people aware of how people suffer.’
Of particular note is the series The Atmosphere of Crime, which was the subject of a reexamination in a 2020 photobook of the same name, by Steidl and the Gordon Parks Foundation, in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which also displayed the series in its entirety between 2020 and 2022.
Originally, a selection of 12 photographs from the series appeared as a photo essay along with a text by Robert Wallace as the first in a six-part series titled Crime in the US launched in Life magazine on September 9, 1957. It was assigned to them as a response to the ‘incredible brutality’ of ‘contemporary murders’ that were seemingly surging across America’s cities.
For his part, Parks and reporter Henry Suydam spent six weeks immersed deep in the urban hearts of Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco; the epicentres of where this brutal criminality was taking place.
Reprinted in the 2020 photobook as it appeared in Life, the original article reread today is glaringly beset by tension as three conflicting viewpoints vie for supremacy.
While both Parks and Wallace wanted to highlight the ongoing failure of then-current policing, and to dispel what Kahlil Gibran Muhammad calls ‘the idea of black criminality’ that went hand-in-hand with it, their methods differed widely.
Early on in his text Wallace outlines two approaches the police can take.
The first is ‘to get tough, to rise up in righteous indignation and try to teach the criminal population a lesson it will never forget. This course, which has been taken many times and places in the past, is now being followed in New York. Many eminent citizens, including one judge, have proposed that a curfew be imposed on the city’s youths whereby teen-agers must be off the streets by 10.30 p.m. or face arrest. The mayor, reacting to great pressure from the press, has ordered that the entire current class of rookie policemen, 536 men, be assigned to night beats while they complete their studies during the day. The governor of the state has offered to give whatever aid he can to the troubled city. A police commissioner has announced that he will meet force with lawful force–obstreperous juveniles may expect to have their skulls cracked.’
The second is to ‘take no extraordinary action at all but merely to think about it, question every statement, fact and statistic and to try and build up an accurate picture of what may–or may not–be happening. This approach may seem mistily academic to the victim of a mugging attack, who would prefer to have the assailant removed from his back, not tabulated. But it has something to recommend it: it has, surprisingly, not often been tried, whereas the get-tough approach has been employed not merely for years but centuries with only small success.’ Before suggesting that perhaps ‘crime has always seemed at its dreadful peak to all generations and that calm men have often been ridiculed for making moderate statements about it.’
Whereas Parks sought to illuminate the harsh realities of the complex human existence of those trapped in cycles of poverty and oppression by highlighting how aggressive policing only reinforced and perpetuated these states of being. ‘It’s more or less expressing things for people who can’t speak for themselves. . . the underdogs. . . in that way I speak for myself,’ Parks said of the series, hinting at his own rise out of poverty.
This is compellingly captured in the title of Raiding Detectives, which shows what Nicole R Fleetwood calls in her essay for the 2020 photo book, a ‘rehearsed site of state violence’. Shot from a low vantage point, we see two detectives in a hallway of a squalid tenement building. One knocks on a door as the other simultaneously begins to kick it in, his gun raised.
However, Life’s editors did not support this position.
In his catalogue essay Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, writes: ‘Where Life’s editors saw menace and threat, Parks saw suffering, struggle, despair and fear.’
This is seen in the incendiary captioning of Parks’ photographs. They stoke and further embed any fear of ‘Juvenile delinquency’ which was being blamed for the rise in violent crime; a commonly-held view by Life’s predominantly white readership evidenced by the aspirational middle-class lifestyles pictured in the adverts that break up the article.
Below a heavily cropped photograph showing men congregating outside a shop is the caption: ‘Half expecting an explosive moment, youths lounge in a store-front light in New York’s Puerto Rican district. Now they are bored. But someone is always kicking someone around, and they keep an eye on the dark.’
Likewise, below Cops Bring In Knifing Victim, Chicago, Illinois (1957) showing the outside of a hospital emergency room reflected in a puddle is the caption: ‘A sidewalk reflects a common tragedy. A police van drives up to a Chicago hospital’s emergency room door with a knifing victim. Tired attendants, once compassionate, sit idly by.’
Alongside the original article and contemporary commentary, the 2020 photo book includes photographs that were not selected. Here, a wider, more nuanced picture of criminality is seen. Parks’ recurring focus on drug use, for instance, demonstrates a belief that the criminalisation of addiction is foundational to this new type of criminality.
In a both haunting and poetic series of 3 photographs Untitled, Chicago, Illinois (1957) a man is seen at various stages ritualistically preparing heroin to inject with only his arms and torso visible. In omitting any identifying features, Parks draws our eyes to his desperation, made plain through the obvious physical deterioration addiction is having on his body. In another Narcotics Addict, Chicago, Illinois (1957), a police officer inspects the outstretched arms of a man for needle marks, while in Untitled Chicago, Illinois (1957), the same action is seen taking place in the greater context of the busy precinct. In the harrowing Untitled, Chicago, Illinois (1957), we see the legs of an addict contoured by healing scar tissue, pockmarked by fresh needle wounds.
Sadly, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems that Parks is poignantly forecasting the brutal and catastrophic effects of the War on Drugs, and the crack epidemic during the 1980s and early 1990s. Here, especially with regards to the latter, hard-line stances by police and politicians amplified racial divisions and further entrenched countless generations in poverty as the drug decimated communities across the country.
The role that race plays within this, Wallace observes, is that a disproportionately high number of suspects are Black and Mexican compared to the country's racial demographics.
‘The fault lies not with the Negro himself but elsewhere,’ he writes, quoting noted sociologist Dr. Thorsten Sellin, who was at the time head of the department of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and had been writing and researching criminal statistics in America for over 30 years. ‘The responsibility lies where power, authority, and discrimination has its source, the dominant white group.’ Wallace continues, ‘To that group the existence of a high crime rate and delinquency among negroes is a challenge which cannot be brushed aside by unscientific platitudes about ‘race inferiority,’ ‘inherited depravity’ or similar generalizations. Negroes are a have not group, the victims of prejudice. Until they are allowed equality, and even for a time thereafter until they adjust to it, their rate of criminality will be high. As Sellin points out, in the past other have not groups such as the 19th century Irish and Italian immigrants in New York City, have had very high crime rates and have lowered them as they prospered.’
But as the full scope of Parks’ photographs show, division along racial lines is not as clear cut as this may have us believe, a distinction Parks attempts to bring to the foreground of the conversation. In both instances of officers inspecting the arms of suspects, for example, they are Black, while in Untitled, Chicago, Illinois (1957), we see a Caucasian man lying at the bottom of a stairwell of a tenement building as if asleep, likely unconscious from drug intoxication.
In A History of Catholic Theological Ethics (2022) Keenan writes that ‘sin is the failure to bother to love.’ In reframing the often-one-dimensional view of sin as an act committed, Keenan highlights the failure to act where it is possible to do so, as a sin, echoing Sellin’s arguments about the dominant white group. Or the failure of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles to heed the assessments and hypotheses provided by the counsellors and doctors while Langley was in prison, as well as Langley’s letter. Or, in the case of Life, the failure of the editors to use their considerable platform in order to present a balanced and accurate portrayal of criminality and why it is taking place.
In a fascinating turn of events 11 years later that illustrates both how binary public opinion on criminality was in 1957, and how effective Parks’ approach in collaboration with Life could actually be, in 1968, Life published another photo essay by Parks: A Harlem Family.
Documented over the course of a month, it is an unflinching portrayal of race and poverty in America as seen through the eyes of the Fontenelle family, who lived in Harlem, New York.
Criminality appears as a grey area, a precipice that the family are forever forced to the edge of. But Parks' ability to capture their underdog resilience with empathy and compassion was so moving, so touching, that unsolicited donations given to the family after the photo essay was published allowed the Fontenelle family to escape Harlem and move into a nicer home in Queens.
Another radical approach to enter into the chaos of another can be found in Lifelines.
In November 1987 Jan Arriens watched the BBC documentary Fourteen Days in May (1987), about the execution of Edward Earl Johnson in Mississippi.
‘This quietly spoken, thoughtful young man was widely liked and respected. No one, from the warden to the chaplains to the other prisoners, wanted him to die. The agonising inevitability of his execution was dreadful enough, but as well as this there was the totally unexpected humanity of the other prisoners interviewed in the film,’ Arriens later recollected.
He wrote to three of the prisoners featured in Fourteen Days in May, Leo Edwards; Sam Johnson and John Irving, thanking them for what they said about Johnson. All three replied with deeply moving, articulate letters. Very quickly Arriens realised that he would not be able to manage each relationship as he would want and so he enlisted friends to take over. Soon afterwards, he brought on Stafford Smith, who had been Johnson’s lawyer, as a patron, and capitalising on the national success of Merrilyn Thomas’ book Life on Death Row (1989), about Johnson, Lifelines was established.
‘Not all prisoners rise above their circumstances and manage to make something of their lives in the most improbable of circumstances,’ begins a chapter in Welcome to Hell: Letters and Writings from Death Row (1997). ‘The extraordinary thing–as their letters show–is that so many of them do.’
Writings from Death Row operates in the same way as the 2020 photo book. Where the latter allows us to objectively see what Parks was trying to achieve and why, rather than the contrived version that was published by Life, Writings from Death Row allows us to peer behind the very worst of society’s criminals and glimpse a far more accurate understanding of where the odious roots of their acts stem from.
In one poignant chapter on remorse, a man tries to explain to the victim’s granddaughter who has written to him, why he ‘chose’ to rob and subsequently murder her grandfather and another man. He goes to great lengths to explain that he is not trying to justify why he did this but is doing it in order to give her a fuller picture of why it happened.
Like Langley did with Lorelei, he explains his life story to her. He tells her about his mother who he describes as a ‘manic-depressive alcoholic’. He tells her that he was her eighth child, the fifth from an illicit affair with her husband’s boss, whose suicide drove her ever deeper into despair and alcoholism.
He graphically describes his mother’s murder by her second ex-husband, ‘a drunk’ who ‘broke in the home, chased her, beat her severely, tied her to the bed, breaking her arm as he bent it around the headboard so that bone was sticking out (it was from this hole that she bled to death), and he then proceeded to beat and rape her and finally raped her with a bathroom plunger handle and left her for dead on the bed this way. . . I never got to know my mother, and a murderer like myself took her from me (Poetic justice?), so I think I have some thoughts as to how you feel.’
Like Langley, his life up until the moment of the robbery, as nearly all the lives written about in the book, are trapped in cycles of poverty, abandonment, physical and sexual abuse, and addiction. He became a breeding ground for nihilism. After trying and failing to get himself onto a better path repeatedly, on June 13, 1986, he ‘snapped’ and went on a drug and crime spree that ‘ended 65 days later with me in jail suspected (and guilty) of two murders.’
As he closes his letter, his eloquence belies both his past actions and the terminal position he finds himself in now.
‘In my photo album here in my cell I have a photograph of the tombstone of the [other man I killed.] (And also, tombstones of my dead grandfather and father.) They are there to remind me, whenever I look at the photos of friends and loved ones, of the true magnitude of what I have done and what I have taken from others. I am truly sorry and I think you need to know this. I think it is necessary if you are ever to find in your own heart the ability to let go of your grief, (and forgive?) and move on with your life so that your own pain will be lessened.’
The idea of forgiveness is an extremely fraught one. But as Lorelei demonstrates, it doesn’t need to be given in order to be merciful.
Christian minister Roy Ratcliff discovered this more than most.
In 2004 Ratcliff was asked to perform a baptism on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer who had requested it while in prison. After some initial wavering, Ratcliff met with Dahmer and chose to go ahead following spiritual counselling and bible study. However, once word of the baptism got out, it provoked considerable public backlash which Ratcliff recounted in his book Dark Journey Deep Grace (2006).
‘A gross misunderstanding of what was accomplished by Jeff’s baptism was apparent. No one said Jeff was no longer guilty of his crimes. He would not be released from prison, nor should he be, dependent on his baptism. Baptism does not take away crimes. It addresses sins. The issue in baptism doesn’t concern justice in society. It concerns the forgiveness of God.’
‘The nature of mercy sometimes leaves the feeling that justice has been violated. This is not true,’ he writes. ‘There is a profound relationship between justice and mercy. Justice without mercy is unreasonable, and mercy without justice is meaningless. The two must exist together, and each must reflect the truth of the other.’
In his eulogy for Dahmer who was murdered 6 months after his baptism along with Jesse Anderson, Ratcliff broached the baptism again, saying: ‘Jeff confessed to me his great remorse for his crimes. He wished he could do something for the families of his victims to make it right, but there was nothing he could do. He turned to God because there was no one else to turn to.’
Writing in the New York Times about the backlash and scorn that Ratcliff received for his book, Dan Barry said:
‘Mr. Dahmer left behind confused parents, dozens of distraught relatives of the victims, the traumatised city of Milwaukee—and this white-bearded minister, struggling still at 60 with the sense that he, too, had been condemned, for having the audacity to grant God’s blessings upon the devil.’
‘“I’m marked as the man who did that,” Mr. Ratcliff says, his tone suggesting frustration, not regret.’
‘People would walk away when introduced to him or argue that they wanted no part of a heaven that included Jeffrey Dahmer. Some would praise him to his face, only to tell others that he had been duped. He was rarely invited to other churches to talk about the salvation of the least of us, because, he guesses, “there is a sense of shame.”’
‘At gatherings of preachers in the region, he says, one minister from Milwaukee constantly points him out to others and says: Do you know who that man is? Do you know what he did?’
‘“I’ve become a little bit jaded by the hypocrisy,” Mr. Ratcliff says.’
‘Last year Mr. Ratcliff wrote a short book about what he calls Mr. Dahmer’s story of faith. The book, Dark Journey Deep Grace has sold poorly—perhaps, he says, because people cannot see that a story about Mr. Dahmer is a story about all of us.’
Because people cannot see that a story about Mr. Dahmer is a story about all of us—it’s an extremely powerful sentiment that viscerally holds up popular culture’s current fixation with serial killers and underscores its irreverence with the humanity of Keenan’s proclamation: Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another. Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022), a scripted miniseries created by Netflix has, the company announced recently, surpassed 1 billion hours in viewing time and is one of their most popular series.
It is a sentiment echoed by Parks when he was invited to witness an execution, and upon seeing the man condemned to death, said, ‘I see myself in that person.’
During a retrial regarding Langley's sentencing in 2004, Lorelei was asked if she thought that Langley was mentally ill.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I do. I think that Ricky Langley has been crying out for help since the day he was born and, for whatever reason, his family, society and the legal system has never listened to him. As I sit on this witness chair, I can hear the death throes of my child, but at the same time I can hear that man crying out for help and yes, I think he was mentally ill when he did it.’
This stunned the judge who couldn’t fathom that Lorelei would not want Langley executed as he did. As a result, she incurred severe and heavy-handed repercussions. The District Attorney's Office threatened and tried to have her second child removed from her, claiming that she was an unfit mother because of her opposition to Langley’s death penalty sentence. Simply because her compassion had made her see her son’s murderer in a new light beyond the comprehension of what the judge was willing to see.