Thomas Lowenstein - The Trials of Walter Ogrod: The Shocking Murder, So-Called Confessions, and Notorious Snitch That Sent a Man to Death Row

MY ORIGINAL IDEA FOR THIS BOOK was to portray a death penalty case from all perspectivesthe victims family, the defendant, his family, the lawyers on both sides, the detectives who worked the case. I wanted to write about the death penalty when it workedkiller caught, tried, convictedand even thought that, through my research, I might come to understand something essential about murderers. It was 2001 and I was working for Dr. Robert Coles, learning about social documentary writing, which I tried out in a couple of articles about criminal justice issues and politics for the American Prospect magazine, where I also worked as an editor of a policy website.

I wanted to try to understand murderers because my father, US Representative Allard (Al) Lowenstein, was murdered by a mentally ill gunman when I was ten, and though we knew who did it and why, for us, as for most family members of murder victims, there is no why that makes sense. You are crushed, sadder than you couldve imagined surviving, angrier than you could imagine at all, bewildered that something so horrible could happen so quickly and eliminate from the earth someone you love. And every morning you wake up knowing youre a day further from them, and that that keeps going forever.

If the killer is arrested, you enter the criminal justice system, hoping for some kind of justice. Its impossible to know then that most likely nothing that comes of the case will help much with your pain, and a lot of what you will have to go through to get any result at all will make you feel worse, because youre not really part of what happens. You might even find out that prosecutors dont have time for you, and even if they listen, they cant make any decisions based on what you say. And its very likely that whatever sentence the killer gets isnt going to be enough for you, even if its life in prison and especially if, as happens in many cases, the killer pleads guilty to a lesser offense and gets only a few years. The reality is, so many murders go unsolved, that youre actually fortunate if, in your loved ones case, you know who the murderer is. In many cases the body is never even found.

In my fathers case, the state of New York deemed his killer not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect and put him in a high-security hospital for a few years and then began the process of gradually releasing him: furloughs, moving him to a way house on the edge of the hospital grounds where he could live for free while working and living in the community. Eventually he was given his entire, unsupervised freedom.

Almost twenty years after my fathers death I spoke out against the death penalty and was involved in two campaigns to prevent its return to Massachusetts. I opposed the death penalty (and still do) not because I feel sorry for murderers or even because I think every human is redeemable; I wish I did, but I dont. I dont debate that there are people who deserve the death penaltysome people do things so horrible they deserve whatever happens to them. But Im against the death penalty because of what it does to us: wastes our money; infects our justice system with racism, classism, and politics; and, in the end, turns us into killers. To put it on the personal level, the man who killed my father deserves, in my mind, whatever happens to him. But its not worth the damage I would inflict on myself and my family to give it to him.

Out of these thoughts emerged the idea to write about the death penalty system when it worked and about the effect this process has on all the people involved in a case. I decided I would chose two death penalty cases at random (so there could be no question of my having picked one to make a point) and write whatever I found out about them. To find random cases, I picked three inmates from a death row pen pal website and wrote to them, explaining my idea and that if they agreed to work with me I would get to see their entire file, would interview as many people involved in the case as possible, and would write what I found to be the truth. Since most of the more than three thousand people on death rows across the country are guilty, I assumed Id be writing about guilty men.

An inmate from Pennsylvania, Nick Yarris, answered my letter. He wrote that he didnt want to do the projecthe was running out of appeals and didnt want to fight his case anymorebut he would give my letter to someone who might. (Two years later Yarris was exonerated by DNA evidence and released from death row.)

Shortly after that I received a letter from Walter Ogrod, who wrote that he was innocent. I didnt believe him, but since my rule was to follow the case of whoever wrote to me, I did just that. Soon, I began to think he might be telling the truth. That was in 2001, and Ive been on the case since.

In the interim, I published an article about the case in a local paper in Philadelphia in 2004, and in 2008 took a job as an investigator at Innocence Project New Orleans, where I did finally learn something about murderers. It turns out theres not much to understand. Most are too angry, too drunk or high, too narcissistic, too crazy, too damaged, too some or all of the above to think about what theyre doing. A few are psychopaths, people who have no feelings for others but can fake them. I once asked the former head of the New Orleans Police Departments homicide division: out of all the murderers youve been in a room with, what percentage were evil (psychopaths) and what percentage were just idiots (the rest)? Ninety-seven percent idiots, he said.

The problem is, this isnt satisfying; the crime of murder is so big we want the suspect to fill up the required space, and our system encourages this because once the victim is dead the entire process is geared to the suspect: who is he, what did he think, why did he do it, did he understand it, and so on. Popular culture is obsessed with the psychopaths, the devious geniuses, but the reality of murder is so grimly different.