Beverly Lowry - Crossed Over: A Murder, A Memoir

Acclaim for Beverly Lowrys

Crossed Over

A book that possesses all the intimacy of a family memoir, all the gripping drama of an In Cold Blood.

Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Beverly Lowrys haunting and harrowing Crossed Over left me feeling better about literatureand life. A very brave book.

Barbara Belejack, The Boston Globe

With her novelists tact and sympathy, Lowry makes a story that is good therapy for us.

USA Today

Beverly Lowry has produced a riveting work, visceral and elegant, which finds humanity where its existence is denied. To read this book is to be swept away.

Thomas McGuane

A moving, engrossing, daring book.

Larry McMurtry

A stunning work of nonfiction. Most remarkable is the authors insight into the human capacity for extremes of violence and tenderness, brutality and nobility.

Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Both agonizing and beautiful. A horror story that is intensely movingeven, somehow, purifying. In this mesmerizing book, a novelist connects herself to a murderer, and succeeds in connecting us as well. There are few literary achievements more remarkable than that.

Los Angeles Times Book Review

You may come to the end of a chapter and find youve been holding your breath. Its a tribute to Ms. Lowry that were stunned by her account of the sort of events that hardly snag our attention when we see them on tabloid television. This is strong stuff.

The New York Times Book Review

[A] rare glimpse of prison life for a woman on death row.

Publishers Weekly

Beverly Lowry is the author of six novels. She is the director of the Creative Nonfiction Program at George Mason University and lives in Washington, D.C. She recently completed a biography of Madam C. J. Walker.

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FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2002

Copyright 1992, 2002 by Beverly Lowry

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1992.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Lowry, Beverly
Crossed over: a murder, a memoir / Beverly Lowry.
New York: Knopf, 1992.
p. cm.
1. Tucker, Karla Faye, 19591998. 2. MurderersTexasHoustonBiography.
3. Women murderersTexasHoustonBiography.
4. MurderTexasHoustonCase studies.
HV6248. T79 L69 1992
364.1523097641411dc20

eISBN: 978-0-307-76596-3

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

As always, for Karla

I know Ive done this, but I dont know what Ive done.

KARLA FAYE TUCKER, 1984

In the late 1980s during a dark and flat time in my life I became friends with Karla Faye Tucker, a confessed murderer who lived on death row in the Mountain View Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections. For several years I visited Karla often, taking I-35 north from my home in San Marcos, Texas, to Temple and then Gatesville, where she lived. Crossed Over, the book I wrote about those visits, was published in 1992. By then I was traveling a lot and had moved a number of times. But we were friends, Karla and I, so we kept in touch. Anyway, her life was strictly ordered by the TDC, and mine gave her a sense of what was possible out in the world. And so I wrote letters, sent colorful tourist postcards from Glacier Park, Seattle, London, wherever I went. And in truth she probably dreamed about someday going to those places herself, even traveling with me. Karla was both optimistic and hungry to learn, eager to make up for lost time, wasted years, big mistakes.

After I moved from Texas, I saw Karla less often but when she had important court dates in Houston, I went back to see her and talk to her lawyers, but mostly just to be there. For the most part presence was my best and only gift, although one time I did manage to buy her a new pair of shoes. Since the TDC didnt specifically order inmates making a court appearance to come back wearing the same shoes they left in, many of them arranged for the purchase of new ones. Karla had sent me an ad showing a particular model of Nikes she wanted, white with a pink swoosh. I bought them and she returned to Mountain View freshly shod. Later she said they were perfect for the exercises she did.

In the next few years, a lot happened. I moved to Los Angeles, then to Missoula, Montana, then to Washington, D.C. Karla fell in love and that June, the traditional brides month, she got married. She couldnt attend her own wedding, of course, and so the ceremony was performed with a proxy bride; afterwards, the groom drove through the Mountain View parking lot honking his horn. He had painted JUST MARRIED all over his car and tied tin cans to the bumper. Karla and the women on death row threw a party to celebrate, and the next Saturday Karlas husband, Dana Brown, came for a honeymoon visit. They drank Cokes and prayed together but could notdid not evertouch. Once when I went to see her, Dana was there. It was the first time Id met him, a volunteer prison chaplain. He and I took our places on the free side of the cloudy slab of Plexiglas separating inmates from visitors; Karla sat on the other. I mostly watched the two of them ooh and ahh like lovestruck kids. Mush through the mesh, they called it. I liked Dana. He made Karla happy. I had come to think of prison lifeeven on death row, warehoused until the state chose to take your lifecertainly as restrictive, but in the end not that different from the way a great many other people lived. I was glad Karla had somebody, a decent man who adored her. She called herself a blushing bride and signed her letters from then on, Karla Faye Tucker Brown (smile).

People think Im crazy, Dana shrugged. Thats fine. Karla and I touch in ways most people can never understand. He bought a condo for the two of them to live in when Karla got out.

Meantime, the appeals process went on and on. Shed been locked up for ten years. All of us fell into a kind of lull, thinking nothing else would happen and we would go on like this forever. Some things dont bear facing up to until you have to. But in the fall of 1997, the lull ended. I was packing to go to teach in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for a semester when I received a call from the office of Karlas appeals attorney, Mac Secrest. Things were heating up. A new date would soon be set, a serious one. Inmates on the row grow accustomed to being assigned execution dates: they come, they go. An appeal is filed, the date is postponed. But Mac Secrest was out of time and options and by now, Karlas case had, as lawyers say, fully ripened. If the execution was carried out, she would be the first woman in Texas to be killed since Chipita Rodriguez was hanged from a hackberry tree for killing a San Patricio horse trader in 1863.