INJUSTICE … AND EXONERATION
Excerpted from “Infinite Hope: How Wrong ful Conviction, Solitary Confinement, and 12 Years on Death Row Failed to Kill My Soul” by Anthony Graves (2018). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.
FOR me, the night of the crime was like any other night. I was just a few weeks shy of my twenty-seventh birthday, and I was dating a young woman named Yolanda Mathis. Our evening started at the home of her dad, Bubba, in Brenham, my hometown, about thirty-five miles south of Somerville, along Highway 36 in central Texas. Bubba’s girlfriend Bernice had agreed to babysit Yolanda’s eightmonth-old daughter that night so that Yolanda and I could have some time to ourselves. After Bernice got off work, we planned to head to my mother’s apartment, where Yolanda and I would spend the night. It was the most convenient place we could go, since I had not yet found my own place after breaking up with a previous girlfriend four months prior. I wasn’t serious enough with Yolanda to invite myself back to her place yet. In fact, I was staying a little bit of everywhere at this point in my life — a few nights with my brother, a few nights with my sister, a few nights at my mom’s.
“Anthony, do you mind going to pick up Bernice from work?” Bubba asked at one point. He explained to me that another family member had borrowed his car but hadn’t yet returned it, and Bernice, who worked at a nearby Sonic fastfood restaurant, would need a ride home after her shift. Bernice had been a babysitter for Yolanda when she was younger and now sat for Yolanda’s daughter when we spent the night together, so I was happy to help out.
“Thanks,” Bubba said. “Here’s a couple of dollars for gas. She should be off work around ten thirty.”
As I was leaving to pick Bernice up, Yolanda’s younger brother and his girlfriend pleaded with me to take them to a Jack in the Box along the way. We decided to use the drive-thru window. I immediately recognized the attendant, a woman related by marriage to one of my younger sisters.
“Hey, Mary, I think we ought to get some burgers for free,” I said, only half-joking. My request denied, we ordered enough food for the three of us and for Yolanda, who had stayed at home with the baby. We made it to Sonic just as Bernice was walking out the door. She hopped into the backseat and we headed back to Yolanda’s dad’s. We arrived there shortly before eleven and socialized for about thirty minutes. In the days to come,
the timing and details of this night would take on far more importance than they ever should have had.
Before we left Bubba’s house, I placed a call to my younger brother Arthur and asked him to make up a bed for me and Yolanda on the floor of my mother’s front room. Her apartment was small, so we made do with modest sleeping arrangements. Yolanda was a good sport about this, when I know she didn’t have to be.
It was eleven thirty when Yolanda and I made it to my mother’s, fast food in hand. While years later I would be forced to consider my final meal, I remember too well what might be called the first meal of my mounting mess: Yolanda had the Ultimate Cheeseburger with extra mayonnaise. I’d opted for a steak sandwich.
My sister Dietrich and brother Arthur were still awake when we arrived. I’m the eldest of five siblings. My sister Demetria, who was twenty-four at the time, and my brother Derrick, who was twentythree, both lived nearby — Demetria in Austin with her husband and two children, and Derrick just twenty miles south in a small town called Bellville — and they visited often. Nineteen-year-old Dietrich and eighteenyear-old Arthur still lived at home with my mom in Brenham, and it was not uncommon to come home to a gathering like this. I opened the door to see Dietrich standing in the kitchen. Knockkneed and tired, she was preparing fish sticks, not a gourmet creation but the only thing my mother had in her refrigerator at the time.
“What do you have in the bag?” she asked Yolanda as we came through the door with our Jack in the Box dinners.
“Go ahead and focus on those fish sticks,” I teased, shooing her away. “Where’s Arthur, anyway?”
She pointed to the back room, where I found my brother on the phone, cooing like one of those old-time Vegas crooners, singing to some girl on the other end. He laughed as he looked up to see me, knowing I had caught him in the act. He raised one hand to cover the phone and put his finger to his mouth as if to ask for quiet.
I offered him some of my steak sandwich as I started to sing, “Look at me, I’m as helpless as a kitten up a tree,” mimicking Johnny Mathis loud enough for the woman on the other end to hear.
The next thing I knew, I was talking to her. She said her name was Kay and that Johnny Mathis was her favorite. We talked for a short time — mostly about nothing — before I handed the phone back to my brother and left the room, singing the Mathis tune at the top of my lungs. I reported back to the girls what I’d just seen and heard, and we shared a laugh at Arthur’s expense.
The three of us talked until a little after midnight, when someone knocked at the apartment door. My sister answered, letting in a neighbor, Albert Wright. Albert had gone by the nickname Squeaky since we were little kids. Squeaky had come by to borrow some bread from my sister after getting a late-night urge to fry chicken. He also asked to use the phone. In the back room, Arthur let him make his call, after which Albert left with his two slices of bread. It was late, close to 2 a.m., when my sister finally retired to her room, giving me and Yolanda some privacy in the front room. We lay on a pallet on the floor, not expecting much more from our long day and late night; we had each other and some quiet now, and that was enough for us.
Little did I know that something horrible was happening that night some thirty miles from where we lay, something that would soon change everything for me.
News of the murders traveled quickly in the region, and it wasn’t long until we got word about what happened. My sister Dietrich was the first to hear the grim details, learning about it early the next morning in a call from my aunt Chee Chee. She woke me up to remind me that my aunt needed a ride to work. I had been borrowing her car after mine was repossessed due to missed payments — a consequence of spending nights in the hospital with my oldest son, Terrell, then twelve years old, which I’d prioritized over holding small jobs to keep the car on the road. Terrell was born with sickle-cell anemia, and every time he got sick I’d be right there at the hospital with him. That was my main focus. My other two sons, Terrance (then nine) and Alex (then eight), luckily had not inherited the disease. But I was at the hospital often with Terrell. My aunt’s car was what was getting me there at the time. Driving my aunt to work was part of the arrangement, and I knew Chee Chee was calling to make sure I wasn’t running late.
“Did you hear what happened up in Somerville last night?” my sister asked in the way someone shares the latest gossip. “No, what?” I asked. “A family got murdered, and whoever did it put the house on fire.” I was still half-asleep, but replied that whoever committed a crime like that needed their ass kicked. I rolled back over next to Yolanda to squeeze the last few minutes of sleep out of the morning before telling her that we needed to pick up my aunt.
Meanwhile, fear and outrage were already beginning to choke the town of Somerville. With a population of just over fifteen hundred citizens, it was far from a hotbed of crime and had certainly never seen a murder of this magnitude. The whole town wanted justice, and justice meant holding someone — anyone — responsible for the act. The rush to identify the killer even infected the mayor, who came out in the papers the following day and stated that whoever committed the murders didn’t deserve a trial. They should be caught and hanged, she insisted. That’s the way law enforcement pursued the case.
In small towns like Somerville, funerals are communal events, and the local news reports provide abundant details. It had been a few days since the tragedy, and by now six caskets were laid out in the local gymnasium for all to see what had been done. Among the grievers was reported to be a man named Robert Carter, the father of one of the children murdered in the home. My family would soon come to realize that this was the same Robert Carter who had recently married our cousin Cookie. Carter showed up bandaged like a mummy, his head wrapped in white cloth as if to cover severe burns. The Texas Rangers took notice, and Carter instantly became a suspect. The Rangers followed Carter to his home after the funeral. When they asked if they could have a chat, he agreed. That chat turned into fourteen hours of interrogation at the local office of the Department of Public Safety.
No one knows exactly what was said during those fourteen hours, and I would never receive any notes or recordings taken during the interrogation, if any existed. The Rangers undoubtedly asked Carter why he’d shown up in bandages to the funeral of his burned child. They would question his odd reactions to it all. Above all, they would wonder whether he’d acted alone. What Carter said in his interrogation changed my entire life: he fingered me as his accomplice, placing me at the heart of a crime scene that I wouldn’t have been able to find if my very life depended on it.