“Get me out of—”
“Calm down,” Larry says, and walks back to his chair. It’s as if the inmates think that because he’s not their regular guard they’ll be able to get away with something. As if he were a substitute teacher. Larry’s not having any of it.
But then the deputy asks Larry to watch the inmates for a minute. Larry walks back over and leans against the door of the holding cell. The first thing he notices is that the inmates are all in bench seats cramped on one side of the room. And on the other, in a chair by himself, is Ricky. Jackson’s in the row closest to Ricky, and he’s rocking in his seat, still agitated. “Man, leave me alone!” Jackson says. “Leave me alone.”
Then Jackson spots Larry. “Sarge, you gotta listen to what this little dude has to say!” Later that’s the phrase that will stick in Larry’s mind. “Little dude.” Because while Jackson, so much bigger than Ricky, can’t seem not to comment on Ricky’s size, what strikes Larry is his tone. Jackson’s genuinely scared. Too scared not to show it, even if the other inmates will give him grief later.
Or maybe, Larry thinks, they won’t. Look at the way they’re all on the other side of the room.
To Ricky, Jackson says, “Tell Sarge what you just told me about killing that kid.”
From his folding chair, leaning forward with his arms crossed and pitching his voice loud enough that everyone in the holding cell can hear, Ricky says that he enjoyed killing Jeremy. “Enjoyed killing the other ones, too,” he says. “The cops will never find them all.” He says that he molested Jeremy and that he was molested by his father, Alcide. “But I’m not angry at him, not at all. I know he enjoyed it. I did, too.”
“That’s sick, man!” yells Jackson. To Larry, he says, “You better not lock me up with this dude.”
What are we watching, as the inmates separate themselves from Ricky just like the schoolkids used to? What are we watching, as he tells and retells the story of the murder? I have read every document I can find from Ricky’s life. I have read psychologist reports and death row reports and even his commissary order forms from the Calcasieu Correctional Center, trying to discern who Ricky might be from the detritus of the record his life has created, and he is still a hard person for me to understand, to know whether to believe. This is the only time on record that he says Alcide molested him. One other time he says he was abused—doesn’t say by whom—but every other, he says he wasn’t. This is the only time he says he killed other children. When he was first arrested, he said, “I never even thought I could, I mean, that’s the first time.”
Still, he has his consistent themes. He likes to say he only chose kids who were hurting already. That he recognized something in their eyes that let him know they’d already been abused. He claims to have recognized that in Jeremy.
He’s told the story in so many ways that it’s hard to know what to do with the telling that’s coming.
There is a grave in Louisiana that bears the body of Oscar Lee Langley, a body of a five-year-old boy decapitated along the side of a road in Arizona, a body his father accompanied home to Louisiana so the child could be interred next to the relatives he’d met only as a baby. That grave has held the dead child for sixty-three years.
But if you listen to Ricky Langley, he will tell you that on February 7, 1992, five-year-old Oscar Lee Langley appeared in an upstairs bedroom of the Lawson house to dance and skip around six-year-old Jeremy Guillory. Ricky will tell you that Oscar grinned a little boy’s gap-toothed grin at him but that Oscar didn’t want to play, he’d come to the house to taunt Ricky. Oscar told him that he was in charge now, the way he’d always been, and that he’d make Ricky molest Jeremy, molest him even though Ricky had been good for months. Ricky shouted and argued with him—and that, Ricky says, was what scared Jeremy and made the child start to run. Ricky grabbed Oscar by the throat—the throat that was Jeremy’s. He wanted Oscar to stop talking, wanted to stop that voice he’d heard in his head since he was a child—and it was Jeremy whom he choked. Ricky grabbed Oscar by the throat so hard that he lifted Oscar off the ground—it was Jeremy’s body that hung from Ricky’s hands. Jeremy stopped breathing.
Only then, if you believe Ricky Langley, did he realize whom he’d killed.
*