THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, May 25, 1995 TAG: 9505250473
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 132 lines
In her dreams these days, Esmon Thompson hears doors closing and locking. She thinks that they are closing behind her brother, Willie Lloyd Turner, and that the dreams mean he will be executed this time. That no court will save him.
That the long, difficult journey that has been his life is about to come to an end.
Turner, 49, is scheduled to die by lethal injection tonight, barring a stay from the U.S. Supreme Court. He was 32 in 1978 when he turned a sawed-off shotgun on Franklin jeweler William ``Jack'' Smith Jr. and fired.
Thompson was a 27-year-old nursing student then. She tried valiantly to help her brother avoid the death penalty, dredging up, for lawyers and psychiatrists, the squalid details of their Southampton County family life.
She visited him on death row until 1989, then stopped. It got too hard to see him there, she says. Also, he wanted it that way. Minimizing contact with his family, he figured, would make it less painful for everyone.
It hasn't worked out that way for Thompson.
``I know the victim's family will probably gloat,'' she says.
``They're probably still harboring their hate and their pain and they want revenge. But at least they've had a chance to grieve the absence of their loved one. We've never had that chance. Willie's isolated, but he's not dead. So it's always been unfinished business.''
Smith's family has not returned phone calls. The attorney general's office routinely advises victims' families to make no comment until after an execution.
Thompson, now 44 and a grandmother, lives alone in a Portsmouth apartment and works as a psychiatric nurse at Norfolk Community Hospital. She has asked for time off this week. She needs to be alone, she says.
At the Greensville Correctional Center's death house in Jarratt, Turner has also asked to be left alone. No family members and no chaplains, he has told the officers who watch him around the clock. He doesn't want to have to take care of anyone else, he says. It's enough of a job to face his death by himself.
Thompson and Turner grew up in rural Southampton and Isle of Wight counties, the children of an alcoholic itinerant day-laborer who didn't work much, and a ``needy and whiny'' mother who barely got out of bed.
The family moved from one farm shack to another and the children were taken out of school at young ages so they could earn money doing farm work. Turner, who left school for good after the fourth grade, taught himself to read in prison during his 20s.
Relatives interviewed over the years for Turner's case paint a picture of five undernourished and bedraggled children infested with bedbugs and living without electricity and plumbing. Their father, Elbert Turner, was the son of a prosperous, half-white father. But Elbert Turner was puny and malformed and frail. After his father died when he was 10, he became estranged from his stepmother and half-siblings.
Blind in one eye, Elbert Turner signed his name with an ``X'' and was unable to operate machinery. An ancient black and white photo on Thompson's mantel shows a haggard man with bulging eyes who died at 44.
``Only thing Elbert really valued, I think, was his whiskey,'' a half-sister once commented in court.
Turner's mother, Gussie, was an asthmatic who ``used her illness to control people,'' according to Thompson. Her children were taught to wait on her, with Esmon doing most of the housework, and Willie doing much of the cooking.
It was, by all accounts, a violent household. When Turner was 7, his mother choked him unconscious for telling his father of her sexual relationship with someone else. He then became caught in the vicious cycle of his parents' infidelity: if he told on his mother, she beat him. If he didn't tell, his father beat him.
``There were no boundaries,'' Thompson says of her family.
``There was no direction. Nobody even thought about if I should go to school. I think my mother was really depressed. She never really did anything. We never even did much talking. All of us are very soft-spoken to this day. It was social deprivation.''
``As a child,'' says Thompson, Turner ``would blank out and his eyes would stare ahead.'' At 15, he had an unexplained seizure.
All the Turner children fled in their early teens. Willie left after being sentenced to reform school for impregnating a 14-year-old girl. It is Thompson's belief that something terrible happened to him there. Something that caused a disassociative split in his personality. He was never the same afterward, she says.
``I think chemically and brain-wise, there is something wrong with him,'' she says. ``Because his moods are so extreme. And when you back him into a corner, he's like a caged animal.''
``He could easily be bipolar. He could even have multiple personalities. On one hand, he's a very sweet person. On the other hand, he's done all these things.''
From behind a Plexiglas barrier at Greensville, Turner dismisses his sister's speculations.
``My family never knew me,'' he says. ``I was going from one place to another when I was coming up. With one cousin or another. I don't know why, but they never knew me.''
After reform school, Turner stayed in trouble. From breaking and entering to disorderly conduct to drunk in public to petty larceny, one arrest followed another.
During those years, his brothers also ran afoul of the law. James McCoy Turner was convicted of rape in 1962. Robert Elbert Turner Jr., now dead, was convicted of armed robbery and statutory burglary in 1959 and forgery in 1962. Herbert Lawrence Turner, now known by a Muslim name, was convicted of two counts of malicious maiming in 1973.
Turner's two surviving brothers managed to turn their lives around. One is an independent contractor in Maryland; the other does carpentry work in New Orleans. Turner never turned his life around.
In 1966, he shot a man named John W. Booth outside a Washington restaurant. In 1968, he went to federal prison for threatening a woman with a gun in Boston. By 1970, he was back in Franklin, arrested for carrying a concealed pistol.
Turner's early prison records are rife with assaults. A small man of about 5-foot-8, he fought constantly with other inmates. In 1973, he stabbed an inmate at the Powhatan Correctional Center. The following year, he stabbed another one, this time to death.
Four years later, on Jan. 9, 1978, Turner was paroled. Six months after that, he murdered Smith.
Turner has been on death row 15 years, longer than any other Virginia inmate in recent times. During those years, says his sister, he has changed. He invented and obtained a patent on a barbering gadget. He got married. And he created his own family of friends and lawyers who have helped him get by.
``I think he's wiser now,'' says Thompson. ``I think he's more caring. I think he would probably think twice before he would ever try and hurt someone else. The people he has met have changed him. People have shown him how much they care.'' < ILLUSTRATION: Color staff photo by BILL TIERNAN/
Esmon Thompson, sister of Willie Lloyd Turner, who is to be executed
today, holds a photo of their father, Elbert Turner. Thompson says
their childhood was difficult, with their alcoholic father and their
mother, an asthmatic, who ``used her illness to control people.''
KEYWORDS: MURDER CAPITAL MURDER DEATH ROW CAPITAL PUNISHMENT LETHAL
INJECTION by CNB