Hitchhiking through Hell

By William Donald Harvey

Now It Can Be Told

That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Michael Justin Bellows grew up in the United States of America, believing, like most Americans do, in the freedom that we were taught about in school. The freedom that men fought and died for, the freedom that is guaranteed to all American citizens by the government that Pres. Abraham Lincoln spoke of in his famous Gettysburg Address.

But now, Mike Bellows is learning a new lesson-a lesson in injustice brought upon him by the American Legal Justice System and American citizens acting as jurors, and all this without him even being proven "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt."

How could such a thing happen in a free country like America you might ask? The answer awaits you in Hitchhiking through Hell.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098076856

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Hitchhiking through Hell

William Donald Harvey

Copyright © 2021 by William Donald Harvey

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 publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

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The fictionally told story of a man’s factual, frighteningly realistic encounters with the legal justice system, as it is, not how it should be.

This book was written inside the walls of the Oregon State Penitentiary by a convict whose story is very much like that of Michael Justin Bellows.

In memory of my cousin, Cherie, and my prayers go out to all those men and women who are wrongfully imprisoned in the United States of America and abroad.

Introduction

Should we the people fear our elected, appointed, and hired public servants whom we empower with the color of law in order that they may protect us and our rights as citizens?

This protection from our police and our courts is there to keep us out of harm’s way; to keep us from fear of harm; and to ensure that our citizens continue to enjoy their constitutional right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.

But when those persons acting under color of law abuse the right, make mistakes, or take the law into their own hands by ignoring the law of the land, innocent people and their families suffer, and their lives are affected and changed dramatically.

This can only be corrected when police, district attorneys, and judges go back to our original legal justice system and the constitutional promise that the accused citizen shall be considered innocent until they are proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

As I have been within the system that I speak of, have proof of being wrongfully convicted, and am presently serving my second prison sentence for a crime I did not commit, I can testify that in today’s legal justice system, an accused citizen is considered and treated as though guilty, until he or she can prove his or her innocence, if possible, and if the accused cannot, he or she will be convicted and punished, often much more severely than the other guy.

If an error, or mistake, is later found out, the citizen will usually be released from custody, usually and only after years of imprisonment, and normally without so much as an apology.

In most of these cases, it is far too late to correct the many catastrophes that have taken place since the citizen’s arrest, such as divorces, property losses, and years of missing God’s gift of watching one’s children grow, not to mention the effects upon the rest of the family and loved ones.

This unforgivable failing of our criminal justice system is being inflicted upon American citizens on a daily basis, an hourly basis, right here in the land of milk and honey, the land of the free—the United States of America.

How could it happen? Read the following pages, hear the evidence, and see that this evil is being perpetrated by the American citizen sitting as a juror and coming to a conclusion that destroys another human being’s life that maybe he or she did it or that it is possible that he or she did it, by the public defender who is underpaid, undertrained, and unmotivated, the judge who is in a hurry to get on to the next case, or who never allows the jury to hear the whole story and by the big business of the Corrections Department, which feeds tens of thousands of citizens working in the business of imprisonment, which needs bodies to get federal funding or to work prison industries at $2 or $3 a day.

And to call it the Corrections Department is absurd where the courts have ruled that the confined have no right to be rehabilitated; where the conditions inside our prisons inherently create personality disorders and other mental conditions; and where schooling, training programs, and human dignity appear to have no place; and where, like it or not, the legal justice system perpetuates its business and cultivates its crops by creating the criminal who shall return to society filled with hatred, poor intentions, and without a past or future, then return to the prison factory, and that crop consists of your children.

1

As Michael Justin Bellows took the witness stand, he knew that he held his life in his hands, and that somehow he had to convince the jury that he had not committed the horrendously disgusting crimes of which he was accused and for which he was now being tried.

Mike thought of how good he looked and that he couldn’t possibly look guilty, but then reality said to him, What does a guilty man look like? But Mike knew that he looked like a decent young man, and that he should impress the jury with his short haircut…that he hoped it didn’t show that it was only cut yesterday, and he was also clean-shaven other than the small neat mustache that he had decided to keep when he shaved off the beard he had grown while locked up, which he had determined made him look a bit evil.

Mike’s attorney, Mr. Wm. Perry Davidson, had dressed Mike up in a very nice three-piece suit and all the accessories, which was the reason Mike now thought to himself, with some humor, that when the jury was first being selected and before the court’s introduction of the parties, the jurors may have had a hard time deciding which man at the defendant’s table was indeed the defendant and which was the attorney.

After being sworn in by the clerk of the court, Mike sat down in the witness chair and tried to look calm, but Mike’s insides were in total despair, and he felt like he had just swallowed a jackhammer.

Mike looked from Mr. Davidson to the jury, then back at Mr. Davidson, hoping that he would say something, anything just to break the silence in that room. He could feel the sweat under his coat and prayed that he didn’t look as nervous as he felt.

Mike had sat and listened while the district attorney had presented his case and knew that he only had to explain those parts of the district attorney’s case that made it look as though he, and only he, could have committed the terrible acts in which he was accused, and this was his chance.

Mr. Davidson raised to his feet. He looked from Mike to the jury, then back at Mike, and said, Mike…or, Mr. Bellows, will you tell the jury, in your own words, where you were, where you were going, and what took place on July 9, 1988, and how you ended up driving the car that was later identified as the same car that was stolen in Reno, Nevada, and the car that was also identified as the same car that ran down and killed Cindy Lou Patterson, age seven, and her sister Carrie Lavern Patterson, age eight, while they were walking to school here in the community of Klamath Falls, Oregon.

Mike cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and began to tell his story of what happened.

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Defendant. Well, I started out hitchhiking a couple of days before all of this happened. I was coming from my friend Ron’s house in Redding where I had stayed for about four days before I landed a job at the employment office there. It was a good job working on a dairy in Seattle, Washington, that offered $1,200 a month, with room and board included. It sounded too good to be true, but the employment office had called ahead and told me that everything was all set up and that I had one week to report in. So, the next morning, after saying good-bye to Ron and his family, I started out for…

Defense Counsel. Excuse me, Mr. Bellows, you said a couple days before all of this happened. For the record, can you tell the jury the date that you left Redding?

Defendant. Sure, it was July 7, about 8:30 a.m.

Defense Counsel. Thank you, go ahead.

Defendant. Okay. Well, I said good-bye and got out on the road to start hitchin’, and I no more than had stuck my thumb out when a car stopped and gave me a ride. I remember thinking, Man, everything is comin’ up roses, my luck is with me, and this thought really hit me when I got into the car and saw this very attractive young lady in the driver’s seat. She said hi and said she was going to Bend, Oregon, and could take me that far. I said, Great, that’s halfway there.

Well, me and Sissy, that was the name she gave me, we hit it off like two peas in a pod and ended up spending the next two days just messing around. We stopped at every bar and tavern we came to in the first hundred miles, then just short of the Oregon border, we stopped at a place where there was a bar, a restaurant, and a motel. Well, we had dinner, then we went into the bar, and while we were there, Sissy went over to the motel and got a room. I waited for her in the bar because we knew it would be cheaper if she went and got the room, then I kind of snuck in later. We ended up spending that night, and the next day and night, in that motel room getting drunk and having sex.

I had told Sissy that I had a wife and kids, and that we had been separated for the last six months or so. She seemed pretty upset when she asked me to go on to Bend with her and I had to turn her down. I explained that even though we were separated, I had hopes of getting my family back together and that I was going to go by the place in Medford where they were staying and let them know where I was headin’.

Even though Sissy acted a little put off by this, she was also very gracious and didn’t say anything more about it while we got ready to leave the motel early on the ninth. We drove to Klamath Falls and grabbed a six-pack of beer and sat in the car and talked for a while and had a couple of beers, then Sissy said good-bye with a big, wet kiss and drove off down the highway. I felt very alone when she was gone. It was almost the same feeling I had had when I left my wife and kids standing in the doorway, waving good-bye six months before.

Well, I shook it off and started walking for the junction of Highway 140 west. I walked all the way without hitchhiking. It was only a couple of miles, but when I got there, I was definitely ready for a ride. But I guess it was bad timing because there wasn’t hardly any traffic, and I had to sit and wait for about an hour before I finally got a ride.

Sissy and I had started out pretty early that morning, about six o’clock, so it was probably about eight or eight thirty when this good-looking red car stopped to give me a ride. I was anxious to see my family so I was happy to finally get a ride, especially in a real nice car, and when I got up to the car, I saw that there was just one guy in the car. It was a nice, new model Ford, and the guy looked like a decent-enough fellow so I figured it would be all right… I worry when I’m hitchhiking about who picks me up as much as people traveling worry about what hitchhikers they pick up…so I jumped in and down the road we went.

It took me all of maybe five minutes to determine that I was in the hands of a drunk driver. He wasn’t doing a real bad job of driving, but he would go fast, then slow, then fast again. A couple of times, he picked up something in a brown paper bag that I assumed was booze and took a big pull off it.

He didn’t speak much at all until finally he offered me a drink off his jug and I said, No thanks, then he asked me if I knew how to drive, and I told him, Sure. He was quiet then for a few minutes, then he pulled over and stopped and told me, Hey, if you want to get to where you’re going alive and in one piece, you had better drive.

I just assumed that he meant that he had finally figured out that he was too drunk to be driving, and after I agreed to drive, he jumped into the back seat, and I didn’t hear another word from him all the way to Medford.

I was worried about getting pulled over because I didn’t have a driver’s license, but I wasn’t going to tell him that because I was afraid that if I told him, he would start driving again, and I just might not get to where I was going alive.

Just as I was coming into Medford, he sat up in the back seat and told me that if I could find us a restaurant that he’d buy us breakfast, and seeing how I hadn’t eaten yet, I thought that was a great idea, both to save what little bit of money I had and to sober him up if he planned on driving on from Medford.

I found a little place to eat and pulled in, and when he got out of the car was the first time that I realized that he looked like someone had dragged him through a knothole. His clothes were dirty and wrinkled, and he looked as though he hadn’t shaven in a week, as well as a look that showed me that he had been on a pretty good drinkin’ binge.

I also noticed as he got out of the car that he was pretty tall, maybe six two, six three, and he had a strong build, wide shoulders, big arms. He wasn’t a little man by any means.

We went into the restaurant and found a booth. When the waitress came, we both ordered coffee. We sipped our coffee for a minute, and then the man introduced himself as Darrell and excused himself from the table. He went back out to the car and got something, then came back in and went straight to the restrooms in the back of the restaurant.

I had a few more sips of coffee and then went over to a pay phone that I had spotted in the comer. I called the number that I had for the place where my wife and kids were staying, and after letting the phone ring several times, I was about to hang up when someone answered and said, Hello. I asked for Tammy, and the person on the other end told me that Victoria wasn’t home and that she was just there cleaning the carpets, but she said that she knew Tammy and that she knew that Tammy and the kids had gone to Idaho to visit Tammy’s dad and that she wasn’t expected back for about a week to ten days. Then she asked if I wanted to leave a message, and I sadly said no, thanked her, and hung up the phone.

I was disappointed, to say the least, because I had really set my sights on seeing my family before I made that long trip on up to Seattle. Well, the sooner I get there and get settled, the sooner I’ll be able to call and ask Tammy and the kids to come join me. That was my thinking at that stage anyhow, and so I decided that I would just continue my journey toward Seattle and see how the job was going to work out.

When I got back to the table, Darrell was there, or someone that resembled him anyway. It was Darrell all right, but he looked like a new man, all clean-shaven, clean clothes, but even these improvements couldn’t hide the fact that he was worn out and tired.

After we ordered breakfast—a Denver omelet for me and bacon and