Political Prisoner of the Year Nominee: Michael R. Pardue

Case Summary: Michael R. Pardue,

Wrongfully Convicted and imprisoned May 23, 1973 despite having all original crimes reversed as illegal.

THE NEW YORK TIMES May 30, 1998, Saturday Section: National Desk

Conviction Set Aside, but in Prison for Life

By RICK BRAGG

The life sentence, like a hand on his chest, pressed harder at night. When the lights died in the cellblock, the youngest serial killer in Alabama history would discard the murderer's persona that gave him status, tell himself he was innocent, and plan his escapes.

Michael Rene Pardue was 17 years old when he was imprisoned in 1973 on a coerced confession in three shotgun murders. As time squeezed around him, he felt he had a right to run.

The first time, he used phony paperwork to move himself to a minimum-security prison. The second time, he faked appendicitis and even had surgery, then fled the hospital. The third time he just rode away, first on horseback, then in a warden's Corvette. He always got caught, after a last cold beer or last mile in a stolen car on an open highway.

He claimed in endless court filings that someone else had killed those three men on Mobile Bay, that a detective known for beating confessions out of suspects had scared him into confessing in 78 straight hours of interrogation. When a Birmingham lawyer finally proved that Mr. Pardue's confession was coerced, he was 41, in prison almost 25 years.

With his murder convictions overturned this past year, and the state unwilling to even attempt to retry him, he could have walked free.

"If," he said, "I hadn't run."

Mr. Pardue, locked in a coldly modern prison in northeast Alabama, is serving a life sentence because he escaped three times from the life sentence the State Supreme Court has ruled he never should have been serving. His escapes, under a "three strikes" law for habitual offenders, mandate life.

"We got a saying," he said, trying to grin even as tears pooled in his eyes. "There's nothing so bad that, by trying a little harder, you can't mess up worse."

The case has drawn attention from around the world, as legal experts and others whose consciences have been pricked by the state's handling of it wonder how state officials can justify his new sentence. Sitting at a bolted-down table in the cafeteria at the St. Clair Correctional Facility, he swears he never killed anyone. The one certain thing is that the state never proved he did.

The state relied mainly on the confession, which was coerced, according to a State Supreme Court ruling on an appellate court decision. It also depended on the confessions of accomplices, who later recanted. It never introduced any physical evidence except a shotgun that was said by its owner to be rusted and covered in cobwebs. "There was no evidence against him, and we know that police coerced other witnesses to lie," said Richard Ofshe, a University of California law professor and expert on coerced confessions, who studied the case. "All the state brought was dirty evidence. This shouldn't happen in America."

But state prosecutors consider the Alabama Supreme Court's decision to uphold the reversal of his conviction as a technicality, and stand by the now-discredited confession.

"There's no doubt in my mind the police used techniques that are simply not used today," said David Whetstone, the present Baldwin County District Attorney. "But, the three victims were shotgunned in the face. If Sirhan Sirhan or Charles Manson were released on a technicality, that would not make them innocent."

State officials are convinced he is guilty even as they concede there is little chance they could convict him again. They will not try. There is no forensic, ballistic or fingerprint evidence, and no need.

"Frankly, the law is on our side," said Robin Blevins, an Assistant Attorney General. "What they're asking us to do is ignore the law."

But Mr. Pardue's lawyer, E. Barry Johnson, said the state was more than willing to ignore the law in 1973. It was no conspiracy, Ms. Johnson said, just laziness and expediency, as small-town detectives cleared their desks with a convenient suspect.

"He was nobody," said Ms. Johnson, appointed by the courts to help in one appeal five years ago. "He was a poor kid and it was easy for them to pin it on him, and no one would care that he is rotting in prison."

He is a neutral-looking man, not tall, not short, not thin, not fat, his blond hair going gray. He speaks softly and moves carefully, the kind of man who can walk down a street without making the dogs bark.

Perhaps no one, except Mr. Pardue, will ever know whether he is the killer the state contends, or a tragic figure.

He knows killing, surely. His life is bracketed by it. He felt it on his father's whisky breath the night he pointed a gun at his mother. He went to sleep with it as prison killings he had seen piled up in his mind.

Killing, he said, "is taking something special. It's the worst thing."

A Son Shattered By Mother's Killing

Life, by spring of 1973, had taught him one lesson: If good luck was a hurricane, it would not even muss his hair.

He grew up poor in South Alabama in mean little mobile homes where air conditioning was a cool fantasy. His father, Shelby, was a welder who drank off-brand whisky and liked to hit.

His wife, Virginia, took it. His son, Mike, took it. It was a bond mother and son had. "She was my world," Mr. Pardue said, "She paid attention to me."

When he was 16, his father, in a drunken rage, shot his mother in the chest. She died in her son's arms. His father did 10 years and then drowned himself slowly, one pint bottle at a time.

By age 17, Mike Pardue seemed destined to take his turn on the cycle of odd jobs, drunken nights and petty crime. The night of May 21, 1973, Mr. Pardue, a friend and a 14-year-old girl were bored and broke in a motel room near Saraland, outside Mobile.

His car had a flat, so he stole two tires from a filling station. The tires did not fit, so he put them in the car's back seat and went back to the gas station and stole a truck. He and the girl went for a joy ride, until the truck got stuck in sand. He went to his grandmother's, where he lived when he was not living in cars.

That next day police in Saraland called to order him to the station. He bummed a ride with a neighbor, and as the car sped along blacktop of tar and crushed shell, he expected to do time.

He never thought, not even with his luck, it would be forever.

Police Make a Case In Three Murders

The police said he blew Harvey Hodges's head off with two blasts from a shotgun as the 68-year-old filling station attendant worked a pre-dawn shift at AA Oil in downtown Saraland, a few miles from the station where the truck and tires were stolen. They said he also murdered Ronald Rider, 20, in another filling station holdup the same morning, just across the Mobile County line in Baldwin County.

The police had found the tires in his car, which connected him to the stolen truck, which, still stuck in the sand two miles from the Hodges murder, connected him to the murders. He had taken the truck from a different station, but a two-mile proximity to a killing made him a suspect in the eyes of Bill Travis, the detective in charge.

Later dismissed amid accusations of brutality, Mr. Travis was a big man with Elvis sideburns, white patent leather boots and a reputation for beating confessions out of suspects, Ms. Johnson said.

Mr. Pardue, according to court documents, was interrogated nonstop for more than three days. He never saw a lawyer. Two lawyers tried to see him, but were turned away.

When he asked for food, "Bill Travis slapped me out of the chair," Mr. Pardue said. He was threatened with the death penalty (there was none in 1973) and one questioner threatened to shoot him "escaping," he said. His body was covered in welts and bruises when his relatives were allowed to see him, days later.

"Pleasing them became the most important thing in my life," Mr. Pardue said.

The investigators questioned Mr. Pardue constantly about the murder weapon, and finally he gave them the name of a distant relative who owned a shotgun. A relative later said in an affidavit that the gun had cobwebs and rust in the barrel, but investigators pronounced it the murder weapon.

There were no fingerprints, footprints or tire tracks. In killings that splashed blood on walls, no blood was found on him or his unwashed clothes.

During questioning, linemen working for the Alabama Power Company found a skeleton in a ditch in north Mobile County, identified as Theodore White, 43. Detectives charged Mr. Pardue with that murder, too, though nothing appeared to link it to him. The death certificate listed no cause of death. But in the indictment, cause of death was listed as a shotgun blast.

As he was being questioned, others questioned his 21-year-old friend and the 14-year-old girl who had been with them on May 21 and 22. Ultimately, the girl said she saw the killings but her statements were conflicting. The girl, whose whereabouts are now unknown, admitted later in a taped interview that she had lied.

Hard Life in Prison Yields Escape Plans

According to court documents, the 21-year-old, John Brown, was interrogated for four days, then signed a written confession. Mr. Brown could not read. Blood was caked in his nostrils and his body was badly bruised, court documents and photographs showed. A doctor treated him in jail.

Mr. Brown did 10 years. He has since said in court that he never took part in or saw any murder. The only evidence against him is a confession he has never read.

Mr. Travis died three years ago. If there ever were other suspects, the names have vanished in time.

At home, Mr. Pardue was cheap labor on the Mobile docks. In Holman Prison, he was the shotgun slayer.

Holman, in South Alabama, was one of the most notorious of the old-style Southern prisons. A man could learn a lot about killing.

"I was there when they killed Tommy Dobson," the inmate who killed a guard with a knife in 1976, Mr. Pardue said. "Six of the guards come in with pickax handles, and beat him to death. They drug him downstairs. I can still hear his head hitting the steel steps."

Later, Mr. Pardue saw another inmate cut a new inmate's head off with a big homemade knife, because the man sat on his bunk. "It happened in Bed 54. I was in 72. I remember he got the mop and started cleaning up the blood."

Mr. Pardue had to get out.

With the help of a prison clerk, he got a transfer to Draper Prison, a much looser, easier prison near Montgomery, and just walked away in the summer of 1977. Police found him in a lounge three days later.

The second escape, in 1978, is legend. He had heard in prison that a man could fake appendicitis, even cause his white blood cells to drastically increase, by drinking as much water as he could and holding it in.

"It creates a viral infection in the kidneys," he explained.

He screamed from the pain. Guards sent him to the University of South Alabama Medical Center in Mobile.

"I no longer have no appendix," Mr. Pardue said.

He woke up in the hospital, to see an elderly guard, dozing.

The police pulled him over a week later about 350 miles away in Port Arthur, Tex.

Reconciling the Past And Planning Future

After a decade in prison, luck finally kissed him, softly.

Her name was Becky Jean Pouyadou, a businesswoman active in Mobile's Mardi Gras society. In 1983, Mr. Pardue saw an advertisement for her mail order T-shirt business. He wrote her, offering to sell designs he made in prison. At first she was not interested, then saw a newspaper story about his case. She wrote him back, and found his letters gentle, sensitive.

They fell in love, one envelope at a time.

At that time, the prison system allowed inmates in minimum security -- he had gained that status by not escaping for several years -- to leave prison on furloughs for eight hours at a time.

"There was a Best Western about a half mile up the road, and I used to get there before him and decorate the place like home," said the woman who would become his wife. "I took off the hotel sheets and put on fresh sheets from home, and I put up pictures. We would make love all day and laugh and cry and hold. It was a wonderful time for both of us."

There was no hope he would walk free, but she married him anyway.

"When Becky came into my life, it started to matter," he said.

In 1985, in a get-tough-on-crime political attitude that would become a catchword for candidates, the state canceled furloughs for inmates like Mr. Pardue.

It was too much.

In March 1987, he was watering a stallion on the prison farm, and just decided to go.

He rode the horse to the home of a warden, who was away, and stole his Corvette.

He just drove, wandering. He found himself back at the little cluster of mobile homes where he had grown up. His father, released from prison, had almost succeeded in drinking himself to death.

"We sat down and just looked at each other," Mr. Pardue said. "He wasn't violent anymore, just pitiful."

Two days later, unresisting, he was recaptured.

Now his lawyer pleads for leniency. But in a state where leniency is virtually unheard of, clemency seems unlikely.

A few days of freedom have cost him forever.