Killer of a Boy: Spiritual Surprises

By WM. Lee Carter

Raymond Davis, a 15 year old newcomer to his community, shoots and kills a man and walks away from the crime scene $4 richer. As a part of pending criminal proceedings, a psychologist (represented as the author) is appointed to study the young killer. Finding the boy to be far more than a distressing statistic, the good doctor muses about his conversations with the youth, the teen's pitiable parents, and attorneys. Along the way, Raymond challenges the psychologist's conventional definitions of spiritual wholeness. The boy looks for, and finds, meaning in the shadows of the most intimate of crimes: murder. In the end, the young predator meets justice, but along the way he and his psychological examiner fall deeply into a discourse that connects this teenage murderer to all of Humankind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543948738

Book preview

Contents

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©2018 Wm. Lee Carter. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses

permitted by copyright law.

ISBN: 978-1-54394-872-1 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-54394-873-8 (ebook)

1

Becky and I have a keen relationship. She’s a paralegal in the juvenile prosecutor’s suite. An avid reader, when her nose is not stuck inside a novel, she scours documents about young offenders whose files flow like the Brazos River through her office. It’s a never-ending stream. She knows I like to write and comment from time to time on the psychological evaluation reports that eventually make their way to her desk. A big woman, she’s pretty, smart, and wry. Short on words and long on depth—a good combination for one whose task it is to aid the State in making sense of the senseless.

Famed nineteenth century Scottish detective Allan Pinkerton purportedly learned as a child to discern the distinctive pounding of shoe soles and could identify his neighbors and relatives even before catching a glimpse of them. Somewhere along the way, Becky honed the identical intuitive skill. As I walked into her office, she turned from a credenza and plopped a chunky folder onto the edge of her desk. Matter-of-factly, she said, Figured you’d be by. Enjoy. This one’s a winner.

I first heard of Raymond Davis weeks earlier on the late night news. It was a Saturday. A newcomer to Waco, he made a big splash on the local scene when he shot and killed a previously unknown man for a few bucks, four dollars to be exact. I had retired for the night shortly after ten o’clock, wafting between consciousness and la-la land when a story broke about a murder by a teenager, who turned fifteen years old scant days earlier. Unthinkingly, I opened an eye as a picturesque newscaster gave sparse details of the killing. She said it was chilling. I quietly hoped to meet the fellow.

Two weeks later, on a Friday, a day I reserve for evaluations at our local juvenile detention center, I saw our county’s juvenile judge in a back hallway. A man twelve years younger than me, whom I admire immensely for his care, concern, and competence; we spoke a moment about teens who commit horrifying crimes and agreed that it is hard to fathom how a kid could perpetrate a cold-blooded slaying. Judge Collier assumed the boy’s court-appointed attorney would request a psychological study as an aid in his defense and informed me that if asked so, he would assign me to the task.

A court order now tucked in my well-worn soft leather bag, I sat across from Becky and took notes on a laptop. She evidently noticed the subtle ebb and flow in my facial muscles. I’d bust as a poker player, at least if Becky were my opponent.

Something else, isn’t it? she questioned.

Something else.

That boy was hurting.

Hurting. An interesting choice of words. I wondered what Becky meant by that remark, but refrained from asking. But she was right. This youth was in bad shape, psychologically speaking. Even more, the victim’s kith and kin.

The Monday after Raymond’s story burst onto the Waco news scene, I ate world-class blueberry pancakes—no butter, sugar-free syrup—at my favorite breakfast spot, Coffee Café. A couple tables down from me sat a regular customer named John, an engineer by profession, who remarked to our mutual waitress, Miranda, that they (whoever they are) should take the young offender behind the courthouse, which sat catty-corner from the coffee shop, and hang him by his toes. Miranda, a simple, but poised twenty-year-old daughter of former migrant farm workers, had the good sense to merely nod. Maybe she didn’t know what to say, or maybe she was being smart. Either way, she did the right thing. But the engineer’s comment set me to thinking.

How did this hurting young teen killer feel right now? Guilty? Scared? Sorry? Smug? Indifferent? Nothing? Is he suffering? Once my mind shifts into overdrive, I often ask questions that have no answer, at least not the kind that offer certainty. Contemplating death, especially death prompted by a boy with a gun, makes life seem so … unsolvable. I understand the philosophical dilemma caused by pain and suffering and free will versus determinism, all that heady theoretical stuff. But man alive, whatever and whoever drives one person to kill another is a mystery.

Here’s a matter I chew on with some regularity: Do all people hurt the same? It seems that we do not. I mean, how many of us hurt so badly that we kill? Or want to kill? Or think about killing? Or simply get really, really angry? Do killer instincts fall along a continuum?

Yes, I believe so.

When I enter a professional relationship with someone, I assume that whatever that person thinks and feels, I am capable of the same. Anything less, and I’m a poor psychologist. If I were Raymond Davis, I could feel better about a shrink who validates everything I experience. Moreover, if I were Raymond Davis I could feel better about an examiner who tries to grasp why juveniles like him suffer and kill. Knowing that might give a kid the confidence to tell all.

Not only do I often consider what it’s like to be an offender whose inner workings beg to be scrutinized, I ponder how it would feel to be like God. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no megalomaniac, just painfully curious. The engineer in the coffee shop made a reference to Raymond playing the role of God when he took a man’s life. I don’t think God is so simple. It seems more comforting to suppose that God is like us in that he gets the Big Picture and is part of our plight. Raymond was hurting, just like Becky asserted, but I wanted to know why. How in the hell does a boy’s soul ache so badly he wants to kill someone?

I didn’t walk out of graduate school knowing my job would eventually have me consort with accused killers. Truth be known, there was a time when the thought of such would have given me the willies. At age twenty-nine and the possessor with a piece of paper that’s the psychological equivalent of a driver’s permit, I was ready to save the world, or at least that part of the planet I inhabit. Having previously worked as a master’s level psychologist for a school district during the several years it took to complete doctoral studies, I secured a few contracts with rural school districts to conduct psychological evaluations of emotionally disturbed youth. I also joined the allied professional staff at a local psychiatric hospital. Quickly, I realized I was working with the same population in those seemingly disparate settings. Every kid I evaluated in a hospital returned to school after discharge. And a heavy percentage of the students I evaluated in schools needed psychiatric care. Over time, my work extended into the juvenile justice world and then to adult offenders and the courts. While the lingo, methodology, and diagnostic questions varied from place to place, I met the same people at every turn.

So before I ever laid eyes on Raymond Davis, it seemed that I knew him. The longer I live, the more convinced I become that we do indeed hurt the same. There is a rhythm to life.

Just as I didn’t set out to evaluate murders, Raymond did not grow up aspiring to become a predator. It just happened. One thing led to another. His relationship patterns changed and evolved, as have mine. In my profession, it’s important to make connections and develop a referral network. A probation officer gives my name to an associate. A colleague refers someone to my office. A defense attorney asks me to take on a new case. A judge sends me business when divorcing adults accuse one another of being crazy. And so, the merry-go-round spins and I hop on for a ride.

Raymond had a referral network, too. He knew people who could secure guns for underage boys. He knew where to look for drugs he could sell for a profit, although I would later learn that he eschewed imbibing drugs and alcohol because he didn’t want to be under the control of anyone or anything other than his own faculties. Smart. He knew whom to trust and who was unreliable. When he got a funny feeling in his groin, he knew which girls would satisfy his longings. Raymond could live well on the streets and sadly, had learned how to survive in custody. Just as I complete a professional version of connect-the-dots, Raymond plays a pirated adaptation for young street thugs. The game is much the same, though we follow markedly different paths.

My task was to enter this youth’s world, think as he does, and retrace the sullied footsteps that led him to juvenile hall. In short time, Raymond would become more to me than a hefty file and a sad statistic.

2

Raymond’s records approximated fiction, trashy fiction no less, the likes of which seemed preposterous and clearly based on something other than reality. However, unfortunately, everything I read was true. He moved from Oklahoma to Tennessee to Texas because he passed out all his greeting cards in the first two states and figured he should look elsewhere for acceptance. Having no home, he bounced from one relative to another from the time he was a toddler. His mother was a drug abuser and maybe a prostitute (a caseworker’s recorded word said it was suspected, but not proven) who slithered in and out of county jail. Likewise, she slipped in and out of her boy’s life. To him, she was an itinerant. A grandmother, and then a pair of aunts were his earliest caregivers, but from the time he was eleven years old Raymond’s guardians were mostly juvenile jailers and psychiatric treatment center employees. From bedraggled paternal relatives, he learned that his father had been released from a Texas prison after serving thirteen years for aggravated robbery and decided to get to know him. An aunt who disliked Raymond gladly purchased a one-way bus ticket to Waco and soon the youth’s new resting place was the concrete floor of a public housing apartment where his father lived with his woman du jour. Within six days, the father and son got into a fist fight. Raymond apparently won the fight, but lost his meager meal ticket and moved in with a nineteen-year-old girlfriend.

Girlfriend? Like father, like son. Four weeks later, Raymond’s residence was an eight by ten cell in juvi.

Frankly, I was surprised when Raymond’s mother answered the phone on the second ring when I called her one evening from the study in my comfortable two-story house. I immediately wondered about her Oklahoma abode—what it looked like, how it smelled, whether or not it was clean, how many people flopped there at night, its square footage, how much food sat in the fridge. Presuming her circumstance differed appreciably from mine, I caught myself being judgmental. A dollar to a dozen, though, she surely bore a human resemblance to a shipwreck. The disheartened, impassive tone in her voice convincingly said so. Just as her son murdered a man, someone killed her soul long ago. Her heart still pulsed, but not much else was on fire.

"Hello?’ said the woman, mild irritation seeping through her voice.

I told this mother who I was and why I was calling. I referred to her by her last name of Johns, but she promptly said, It’s Cheryl as a means of stating that she did not dwell on formalities. I doubt that she owned a silky dress or nice shoes or gardenia-scented perfume. Right or wrong, I pictured her as a poorly nourished woman wearing worn leggings, t-shirt, flip flops, and no makeup. She mumbled as if she had bad teeth, making me think my uber-compassionate dentist, who also happens to be my son-in-law, could surely be of benefit to her.

Cheryl grunted minimally when I said I was sorry her son was in trouble, which I took as an expression of gratitude, if muted. I told her I’d be meeting Raymond in a few days and had some questions about his life beginnings. Apparently assuming she might as well be honest, she admitted, I hadn’t been around much, so you’ll have to ask him about where he’s been. He knows more than I do. As kindly as I could, I asked her to explain why she and her son had been apart for so much of his life. Visualizing her shaking her head, I had to strain to hear her say, It just didn’t happen that way.

Using her words as a lead-in, I asked, "What did happen?"

"A whole lot of shit … it was a whole lot."

Can you find a place to start?

Want me to tell you about me and Raymond’s daddy?

Yes, I’d like to know about that. Without Cheryl’s awareness, I put the phone on speaker mode, set it on the desk before me, and clicked away at my laptop as she talked. Whenever I responded, I leaned into the phone so my voice didn’t sound as though it bounced upward from the pits of a well. My vocal tone is soft enough as it is, so I’ve learned to speak up when I converse with people.

I heard he got out of prison and ended up in Texas. That where you’re calling from?

Yes ma’am, Waco.

Hot there?

It sure is. The temperature hit 99 degrees today and everyone was relieved it wasn’t worse. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Texas’ prisons, which would provide room and board to her son for who knows how many years, are not air conditioned. That’s right. They’re not air conditioned. But that’s another story for another day.

Raymond’s daddy was a bad dude. He still bad?

I haven’t met him, but I hope to.

Well, if you do, don’t mention me.

You two ended on bad terms?

Oh yeah.

Tell me about him. What’s his name? How did you and he meet?

His name was Tevis. Tevis Davis. We went to school together, but he quit before I did. He said he was gonna get a job. I think he just ran drugs with them gang homeboys of his.

Tevis was in a gang?

That’s what they said. I couldn’t really tell you. I didn’t like his friends any more than I liked him, but yeah, I imagine it was true.

Were you all together long?

To be honest, I’m not sure I’d know him now if I saw him. We were never together. Back in the day we got along for a minute, but mostly it was bad. No, she repeated, we weren’t together.

Ah, there are moments when I want to offer people unsolicited life lessons and this was one of those instances. At some point in time, even if just briefly, Cheryl and Tevis were together, if you get my drift. The smart alec in me kept quiet.

The phenomenon of hooking up has never made much sense to me. As if an explanation is needed, two people agree to do it with no strings attached. One person growls, the other purrs, and there you have it—a hook up. As mentioned above, I read a notation by a Child Protective Services caseworker that Cheryl was suspected of prostituting, but nothing of the sort was confirmed. Since Cheryl informed me that she knew Tevis from school, I assumed he was not a client, but merely a guy who was in the right place at the right time. But maybe, he was the appreciative type who gave her some gas money just for the heck of it. Or maybe they were two ships passing in the night. Who knows?

A few short years ago Dr. Donna Freitas wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal about the pitfalls of hooking up. A leading researcher into that social trend, she found that a surprisingly high percentage of young adults who engaged in casual sex felt rotten about their experience and themselves afterward, even those who hooked up with some regularity. Being sexually free, Freitas opined, does not always deliver on its flirtatious promise of sensual joy. Her commentary was largely about middle class educated young people, so I wondered if Cheryl bore the pains and stains left by slap-and-dash encounters just as those research subjects did. Her voice suggested she did. But I wasn’t about to ask, and I wasn’t about to speak to her of moral issues. My concern was Raymond’s history.

So if you two were never together, what kind of history did you have?

At first it was alright, but we fought mostly.

Even though you were just teens?

That man been fighting since he was little. And when he fought, he hit me like a grown man. But I hit him back like a man, too. Stabbed him once. I’m not afraid of anybody—but don’t get me wrong. I’m not the fighting type, at least not anymore. I hated him then and I hate him now. We fought even worse when he was drunk. Did you know about that? Tevis liked to drink. Had a ‘40’ in his hand practically every time I saw him, and we was young back then.

I have enough experience with beer drinkers to know a 40 is a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor. It’s cheap, and convenience store clerks, for some reason, persistently serve it up in a brown bag. Must be a federal law about it or something such. Paradoxically, I later learned that her son’s victim also downed beer 40 ounces at a time.

What about Raymond? Does he show similar tendencies?

Cheryl choked up. He was bad before he ever started to school. I love him because he’s my son, but I’m just being honest—he was pretty bad. I probably wasn’t the best mama in the world, but I love him. You need to know that much.

I heard sniffing through the phone and a pause before speaking again. Seven minutes into a conversation with a woman very different than me and I already liked her. There’s something laudable about people who lay it all out on the table, and Cheryl was surely that type.

Cheryl, can I ask a tough question? Did your rough relationship with Tevis spill over to your relationship with your son?

The silence on the other end of the phone was brief, but telling. I left him with my mama. She told me Raymond was just like his daddy. I knew that, but I didn’t think it would go this far. Don’t nobody want to be like Tevis.

I know you’re telling the truth when you say you love Raymond. Though I couldn’t see her, I sensed her nodding her head. No matter how far apart a mama and her boy drift, mothers never quit loving their children, even if their children commit odious acts of injustice. After you and Tevis parted ways, which direction did you go?

The wrong way. She paused and I waited. She obviously required little prompting. Cheryl figuratively carried a substantial burden and needed to lighten her load. Momentarily she continued, I don’t know. My mama kicked me out and kept Raymond. She didn’t do no better with him than she did with me. Sometimes I wish I’d taken him with me, but I couldn’t. I mean, I was just seventeen when I left home. He was just two. I didn’t leave him because I wanted to. He might think I did, but I didn’t. I just want you to know that. Don’t know what the boy thinks of me.

"So when you left home, you didn’t know where