FINAL HOURS
Atheist chaplain Devin Moss spent a year ministering to convicted killer Phillip Hancock. Together, they wrestled with one question: How to face death without God. Moss talks to .
‘God, that chicken.” Devin Moss has a voice that rumbles, low and slow like distant thunder, but this morning it was softer, more contemplative. His hands gripped the steering wheel of his rental car. He was dressed head to toe in white linen, his body glowing in an almost celestial way, as he drove toward the Oklahoma State Penitentiary.
Moss, a chaplain, had spent the year working as the spiritual adviser to Phillip Hancock, a death row inmate in Oklahoma. The morning of the November execution had arrived. The prison had brought Hancock the wrong last meal the night before, white meat from KFC instead of dark.
“That chicken, I know,” echoed Sue Hosch, an anti-death penalty activist seated in the passenger seat beside Moss. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Hancock, convicted of two murders he committed in 2001, was scheduled to be executed at 10am. With three hours to go, his lawyers were still hoping that Oklahoma’s governor would grant him clemency, as the state parole board had voted to recommend three weeks earlier.
State lawyers and family members of the victims had continued to push for Hancock’s execution. State officials had reminded the parole board that one of the victims was only 38 when he died, and was of “great assistance” to his parents. The death of the other victim, they said, deeply affected his younger brother.
Moss was driving to the prison to be with Hancock. After more than 100 conversations, their relationship — death row inmate and the man charged with caring for his soul — had come down to this morning.
Moss thought of the outrage Hancock had shared with him. “The good Christians are going to strap me to a crucifix and put a nail in my vein?” Hancock had asked. “Do they really think that their God approves of them?”
The grey Oklahoma skies opened into a drizzle. Moss wondered what he had to offer Hancock in these final hours, when ordinary wisdom seemed to fail and prayers, in this case, were irrelevant. Heaven, hell, salvation: He had talked about it all with Hancock, but neither of them really believed in anything but people. What humans were capable of doing, for themselves and to one another. Both men were atheists.
Moss stopped his car in front of the three-storey building on the prison grounds where he would spend the next hours waiting. He got out and stood still for a moment. He considered the possibility that Hancock had hope for survival, not through divine intervention, but the state’s Governor Kevin Stitt — who two years ago said he claimed “every square inch” of Oklahoma for Jesus Christ — could still grant clemency. He had just under three hours.
But if the hour of death came to pass, what would the chaplain do? Moss felt viscerally the absence of any higher power on the prison compound that morning.
“It’s well known that people who really believe, that really have faith, die better,” he said. “How can we help people die better that don’t have supernatural faith?”
IN PRISON, they have a name for people who find God after they are locked up: “Jailhouse Jesus”. History is rife with examples including, famously, Malcolm X, who found faith in prison and left to be a minister of the Nation of Islam.
Scholars who examine the phenomenon find that in prison, faith can be a comfort. People are searching for a new identity beyond “criminal”, a sense of empowerment, the vocabulary to ask for forgiveness and the feeling of control over their future. Religion answers all these calls: The new identity is that of a convert. The power is in being an agent of God. The route to forgiveness runs through belief, or proselytising. And past sins become just steps on the path to God.
Hancock, 59, had the opposite path. He had entered prison as a Christian, with an appetite for reading, learning and debate that he shared with many imprisoned believers. Along the way, he became an atheist.
As a child, in Oklahoma City, he went with his parents to a Methodist church. He and his friends often left services and went to a nearby car wrecker’s lot to smoke weed and cigarettes. In the summer, Hancock went to a Baptist Bible school, where he recalled being judged for his family’s freewheeling religious practices.
Still, in 2001, Hancock called himself a Christian. He wasn’t devout, but he was a believer.
One night in late April of that year, according to case documents, Hancock went to the home of Robert Lee Jett jnr. Jett had been supplying drugs to Hancock’s then-girlfriend, who was staying with Jett while she and Hancock were fighting over her drug use.
Hancock and Jett got into an argument, along with Jett’s friend, James Vincent Lynch. During the dispute, Hancock wrested away Jett’s pistol. He then shot and killed both men. After killing them, Hancock evaded capture for a year, until he was booked into the county jail on an unrelated charge. At the time of the killings, Hancock attributed his survival to God.
“This is something that my stepdad used to tell me — he used to say, ‘God knows what you need before you need it,’” Hancock said during a phone call in May with Moss.
“I walked out of the house thinking God had intervened on my behalf to deliver me from the hands of violent men.”
During Hancock’s trial, prosecutors argued that he did not commit the murders in self-defence. Hancock fired multiple shots, at a distance from the two men. Hancock had also been convicted of manslaughter in 1982, when he shot an acquaintance in a dispute. In that case, he also claimed the shooting was in self-defence and served just under three years in prison.
In 2004, an Oklahoma jury found Hancock guilty of two counts of first degree murder and sentenced him to death.
Over his early years in prison, Hancock had come to feel abandoned by God.
Then, in 2007, a court denied the appeal of his death sentence. Hancock had a revelation: “I decided, it makes more sense to me to hate a
God that does not exist than to be slave to one,” he said. “The weight of the world came off of me. Because I wasn’t concerned about this maniacal, narcissistic, omnicidal psychopath.”
IT WAS clear to Moss that his spiritual care client was seething with frustration at his sentence.
“I tend to get adrenaline rushes when I think about this because I’m so angry,” Hancock told Moss in February 2023. “They’ve stolen my life from me.”
Hancock had one request of his spiritual adviser. It was drawn from a set of Bible verses, Philippians 4:7-8.
“Show me something real,” he said to Moss. “Tell me something true.”
Sometimes they discussed philosophy; Hancock liked to quote Plato, Pyrrho and Buddhist thinkers. (“Everything’s ‘maybe’ with the Buddhists; it seems like it all boils down to ‘maybe’,” Hancock said, to which Moss replied: “It’s a wise maybe.”) They explored biblical stories — Noah’s flood, Cain and Abel, Samson and Delilah.
“What’s interesting, Phil, is how much the Bible and Christianity and the Old Testament influences you,” Moss said.
“That stuff is ancient wisdom that was commandeered by people with less than innocent intent,” Hancock replied.
From time to time, Moss wondered aloud what exactly Hancock was seeking in these meandering discussions: “Why did you feel it was necessary to get a spiritual care adviser for this part of your life?”
Hancock explained that his initial motive was simple. Because of a Supreme Court ruling in 2022, which said death row inmates had the right to be with their spiritual advisers during the execution, Moss would be able to be in the execution chamber.
Hancock said he liked the idea of having Moss next to him at the end. “You’re a wonderful person, as far as I can tell,” he said. “I mean, you’re absolutely charming. I like you man. You’re a nice person. I think you’re sincere.”
Moss began visiting in person starting in July. The two sat together, with Hancock’s friend, Hosch, the anti-death penalty activist, for four hours in the visitation room, surrounded by other inmates spending time with their wives and children.
Moss felt like he had spent months swimming in Hancock’s pain and anger, but sitting opposite one another was different — taking in Hancock’s skinny frame, draped in a maroon prison jumpsuit, his head covered in scars and his nose that had been broken in several places. Their laughter felt more genuine when they were just inches apart.
Moss stopped feeling so anxious about what he was offering Hancock. He listened, as Hancock ate vending machine cheeseburgers and drank cans of Mountain Dew. It became clear to Moss that Hancock did not believe in God, but he did believe in what people can do for each other.
He seemed to believe, in particular, in the relationship he was building with Moss.
They kept revisiting the legal case, too, because Hancock and his lawyers were busy preparing for a clemency hearing when they would ask the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board to consider new evidence that Hancock had acted in self-defence. They presented testimony from Hancock’s ex-girlfriend that she had asked Jett to “take care of ” Hancock.
The state argued he still deserved the death penalty. “Hancock is before you now, over two decades on from the double murder of Jett and Lynch, still asserting his legal innocence, still claiming he acted in self-defence,” the office of the attorney general wrote to the board. “But the evidence doesn’t back that up.”
Still, the board voted 3-2 to recommend clemency. Stitt would make the final decision, and he had up until the scheduled hour of the execution to respond.
THE EXECUTION was set for November 30 at 10am.
The night before, Moss ironed his white pants and white shirt. If the execution went forward, he wanted to look like a spiritual authority while standing at Hancock’s side. He wanted Hancock to understand he had a buddy with him, but that it was also a person who had a deeper role to play, someone who had touched his soul.
That morning, Moss wrote out in a notebook what he planned to say to Hancock in their final minutes together. Hancock was in his cell listening to music from the heavy metal band Slayer.
Moss arrived at the prison at
7.35am and entered the room where he would wait for a decision from the governor. The minutes moved in a torturous crawl. Soon it was 8.30, then it was 9am. The lawyers and prison staff were waiting together.
About 10.10am, an aide for the governor called. The execution was to move forward, quickly.
Because of the delay, Moss had to cut short his final minutes with Hancock. He had been told that they would be together for 20 minutes, but instead they got only about 10.
“Phil’s been shorted again,” he thought, remembering the fried chicken.
Moss was shuttled to H-unit, where the execution chamber was located. He entered the sparse room where Hancock lay strapped to a gurney, wearing a grey shirt and with a white sheet covering the lower half of his body. Moss was struck by how tiny the space was, and the tightness of the straps slung over the gurney.
At 11.15am, Hancock was given a three-drug lethal injection: midazolam for sedation, vecuronium bromide to halt respiration and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. As his eyes closed and his chest rose and fell, liquid moving through the IV, Moss stood at his feet, hoping his friend could hear him. “You are loved,” Moss said over and over. “You are not alone.”
At 11.23am, Hancock was unconscious. When his chest stopped moving and his face appeared to lose colour, the prison doctor called his name, listened to his heart, opened both his eyes and inspected them under a light. At
11.29am, Hancock was pronounced dead.