A life ticks away -- too fast or too slow

The victim's relatives wait as a man convicted of a 1977 murder is set to die this week.

By KELLEY BENHAM, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 24, 2003

Natalie Brady's family is still waiting for the day they can remember how she loved to laugh, without imagining how she must have screamed.

Amos Lee King Jr. is waiting for the day a court believes he didn't kill Mrs. Brady. If that never happens, he's ready to stop dreading the needle and let it end.

[Times photo (2002): Scott Keeler] Amos Lee King Jr., shown at a prison news conference, says he did not kill Natalie Brady.

If the moment comes when King, strapped to a gurney, looks into the faces of the people who have come to watch him die, it will end a grueling, tortuous battle for those on both sides of the death chamber window.

They have been waiting, all of them, for 26 years.

It isn't the longest wait for justice the system has ever seen, but it might be the most agonizing. Three governors have ordered King's execution. Five times, the state has set the date.

Dec. 4, 1981.

Nov. 30, 1988.

Jan. 24, 2002.

Dec. 2, 2002.

King, now 48, has survived them all, insisting on his innocence, battling first the electric chair and now the needle. He has won reprieves six times. No one is sure, but it could be a record.

Two weeks ago, Gov. Jeb Bush ordered the execution once more, and the warden set another date: Feb. 26, 2003 -- Wednesday, at 6 p.m.

As King's lawyers scramble to save him, Mrs. Brady's family hopes that justice, if it arrives, will be worth the wait.

Fifteen minutes

The last time Amos King was supposed to die, Dec. 2, 2002, three of Mrs. Brady's nieces met in Georgia and drove three hours south to Starke to watch.

"I need to make sure that it happens," said Monica Watson, whose mother, Marie, identified Mrs. Brady's burned body in 1977.

That same morning, lawyer Barry Scheck jostled through the security line at the Newark, N.J., airport, bumping and begging other passengers to let him through, telling them he was trying to save a man's life. In Tallahassee he planted himself at the governor's office and asked Bush to do what the courts would not.

At Florida State Prison, the witnesses waited together. Mrs. Brady's relatives finally met King's surviving victim, former prison guard James D. McDonough, who was stabbed more than 15 times in a fight the night Mrs. Brady died.

To Watson, it was a small gathering of good people in a place seething with bad energy. They had been told King would see who was watching through the window as he said his last words. They wanted him to see their faces.

"He killed somebody that was really loved," Watson said. "He needs to see that she had somebody that loved her."

King's state-appointed lawyer, Peter Cannon, waited at the prison, prepared to watch King die. Not all lawyers do that, but Cannon believes it's his job. Earlier in the day, two courts had rejected King's last appeals. There was nothing more Cannon could do for him now. In 15 minutes it would be done.

King waited in a 12- by 7-foot cell on Q wing, next to the death chamber.

He had met with his Buddhist spiritual adviser and made his two phone calls. He had eaten his last meal, a seafood platter. He declined a sedative, practiced his breathing exercises, and tried to stay calm.

"They had pushed out the gurney," King said. "I could see them getting the chemicals ready. There was this Russian doctor holding a stethoscope. He was half taunting me, like, 'This is the end.' "

Then the prison colonel came out of the death chamber and walked over to his cell. He leaned down, his face a foot from King's.

"You got a stay."

An apologetic staffer from the governor's office broke the news in the witness room. The family was shattered. The room alternated between curses and quiet.

"There was a lot of volatility," Watson said. "A lot of anger."

Everyone gathered around a speakerphone to hear the governor say he was sorry.

'Why isn't it enough?'

The phone rings when a date is set. It rings when appeals are filed. It rings when stays are granted.

Reporters from all over call Brady households in Florida, Georgia and Alabama. Sometimes the family just lets the phone ring.

"What more can any of us say?" said Mrs. Brady's niece, Peggy Scheerer.

They are tired of being reminded how the woman they called Tillie, at age 68, crawled through her burning home, bleeding in her nightgown, and made it as far as the back doorway before she died.

Sometimes long stretches go by, and they almost relax. But it never lasts.

"I hate that this is allowed to go on," Watson said. "It's been crammed down our throats for 25 years.

"Why isn't it enough?"

The oldest of 10, Natalie Brady was like a mother to her sisters and her nieces. She was the one they wanted to grow up to be. They never thought of the plump, gray-haired woman as old, and they never saw her without a smile.

She and a brother operated a restaurant on Tarpon Avenue in Tarpon Springs, where Mrs. Brady cooked fried chicken and fish chowder and fed even those who couldn't pay.

She had a husband, Ivan, who adored her. After he died, she lived alone in a one-story house at the end of Brady Road.

She was afraid when a minimum-security work release prison was built 200 yards away, close enough that she could see the prisoners in the exercise yard.

"Oh," she told relatives, "I hope they have enough guards."

On St. Patrick's Day 1977, she played bingo, then came home and put on her nightgown.

Before daylight the next morning, firefighters arrived at her burning home and found her lying on the floor -- raped, stabbed, choked, beaten, burned.

Over at the correction center, a guard had just discovered 22-year-old prisoner Amos King outside. King and the guard fought, and the guard was stabbed at least 15 times. The knife, found later, looked like others in Mrs. Brady's kitchen. The attacker had King's blood type.

The trial and sentencing were over just 94 days later, but resolution was a long way off.

Some of Mrs. Brady's siblings have died waiting for it, and even the youngest have grown old. She has two sisters left, both in their 70s. Eva still puts flowers on Tillie's grave. Marie wants people to know what a good person her sister was, but talking about it with strangers makes her cry.

Mrs. Brady was a forgiving woman who saw the best in everybody, her nieces said. They believe she might even have been able to forgive Amos King. Marie wishes that King would just confess, so that she could forgive him. She can't bring herself to forgive him if he won't ask.

Since they were little girls, Mrs. Brady's nieces have wanted to be like their aunt. But it has gotten harder: They have to set aside so much hate to do it.

"I did not want to hate him. I did not want to hate him. But you know what? I hate him," said Watson, who was 20 when her aunt died and is now 45. "Yes indeed, there are evil people in this world, and I just believe Amos King is one of them."

They are Christians, like Mrs. Brady was. The Bible tells them they shouldn't want King dead, but they do.

They want to remember the sweaters Mrs. Brady knitted, without having to remember how the killer jammed the long wooden needles into her. They want to remember how she loved to cook, without thinking of the paring knife he used to stab her.

"We want to try to picture her and just remember," Watson said. "You want to not picture her trying to crawl through the house to escape the flames, with her legs broken and her ribs broken and, oh, you can't, you can't, you can't."

'In battle. Amos King'

Since July 13, 1977, King has spent most of his days in a 6- by 9-foot cell with a little black and white TV and a radio that sometimes works. When he's in that cell, he can sort of see out a window through the bars. He reads, he studies the law, and he pleads his case to anyone who will listen.

He admits guilt in the escape and in the fight with the guard, and he won't argue insanity or a bad childhood in the murder of Mrs. Brady. Only this: "I'm innocent. I'm very innocent."

Cannon, his attorney, said it's not just his fault that King's appeals have gone on so long. Part of the problem, Cannon argues, is that the state's case was flawed to begin with, and that the state has made so many mistakes in the decades since.

DNA evidence that could have proven his guilt or innocence has been thrown away. Courts have ruled that his attorneys did a bad job, and once overturned his sentence because of it. The medical examiner's competence has come into question. King has gone through two judges and a slew of lawyers.

While in prison, he has lived long enough to take advantage of DNA testing. He has lived long enough to see the end of the electric chair.

He has lived long enough to see the invention of the Internet, and he wrote a 128-page analysis of his case on notebook paper and had it posted on a Web site, amosking.com.

He writes a lot of letters, and sometimes signs them, "In battle. Amos King."

He has watched death row grow over the years and watched his neighbors die off, get released, go crazy. His first sidekick killed himself, he said, and over the years so did a half-dozen more.

The average stay on death row is 11 years. King is the longest-serving death row inmate from Pinellas County. Others have been waiting longer, but no one has ever been executed after a longer wait.

King has gone into Phase 2 of Death Watch three times.

During Phase 2, the week before the execution, a guard sits outside his cell and watches him around the clock -- watches him sleep, watches him brush his teeth, watches him go to the bathroom.

He has been measured and remeasured for his burial suit. He has made funeral arrangements and asked his spiritual adviser to pick up his body. He has sat on a gurney while a masked medic examined his arms for a suitable vein.

Sometimes he dreams about being executed.

It's unnatural and immoral for a man to know the date he is going to die, Cannon said. In murder cases, one factor juries use to decide how much victims suffered is whether they knew they were going to die. King has had a quarter century to ponder his death.

Cannon and his fellow lawyers know the wait has been hard on Mrs. Brady's family.

But it can't be any easier, the lawyer said, for the man who is condemned to die.

"It's cruel," Cannon said. "How many times can a man prepare for his own death?"

King came within four days of dying in December 1981.

He came within one day of dying twice: in November 1988, and again in January 2002.

He came within an hour of dying Dec. 2, 2002.

He has eaten his last meal twice.

"In my distant thoughts sometimes I think it would be better if I wasn't innocent," he said. "So I could tell them ... I'm sorry, and to get it the hell over with."

Death watch

Gov. Jeb Bush set a new date this month, after King's last round of DNA tests failed to prove his innocence or his guilt. Bush called the execution "long overdue."

King was marched in leg irons and handcuffs to see the warden, who chose the date and delivered the news.

King's lawyers scrambled together a number of motions. They endured a scolding from the judge for bringing evidence forward so late, apologizing again and again as King listened in on a speakerphone from death row. King pleaded with the judge, stuttering with nervousness. She hung up on him.

But Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge Susan Schaeffer allowed a search for DNA on Mrs. Brady's nightgown and two knitting needles.

"This case has languished for over 25 years," she wrote. "Any additional delay ... makes a mockery of our system of justice."

They didn't wait long. Four days after the hearing, the results came back. There was no DNA to test.

Cannon lies awake some nights, searching for something else he can try. He paces with his chin in his hand and three rolls of Tums in his pocket. Seven days after King's last stay, he watched his client Linroy Bottoson die in the death chamber. He looks into King's face and tries not to let it paralyze him.

King told Cannon that he was starting to see signs that this time it is really going to happen. Even normal prison procedures, like the guard who follows King with a note pad, began to seem ominous.

"He's frustrated," Cannon said. "He's nervous and he's scared."

Mrs. Brady's family struggles -- still, again, always -- with frustration and anger and guilt and an odd, sad hope. They see signs, too, but not like the ones King sees.

They saw death row cleared in Illinois. They saw Rudolph Holton walk off death row in Florida last month. Now new DNA evidence could spare Florida death row inmate Paul Hildwin.

"You just feel defeated," Watson said.

King has filed some appeals to the Florida Supreme Court. He would like to get a clemency hearing, but he knows the chances are not good.

If King gets another stay, it will be his seventh.

If he doesn't, all this will end two days from now, in a bright, quiet room at the Florida State Prison, with the prick of a needle.

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