Fiction Competition Winner: Incident at Gulf Shores

• Publication year: 2019
• Pages: 0042
• Citation: Vol. 24 No. 6 Pg. 0042

Fiction Competition Winner: Incident at Gulf ShoresNo. Vol. 24 No. 6 Pg. 42Georgia Bar JournalJune, 2019

GBJ | Fiction

Incident at Gulf Shores

The Editorial Board of the Georgia Bar Journal is proud to present "Incident at Gulf Shores,” by Dick Donovan of Dallas, as the winner of the Journal's 28th Annual Fiction Writing Competition.

BY DICK DONOVAN

The purposes of the Fiction Writing Competition are to enhance interest in the Journal, to encourage excellence in writing by members of the Bar and to provide an innovative vehicle for the illustration of the life and work of lawyers. As in years past, this year's entries reflected a wide range of topics and literary styles. In accordance with the competition's rules, the Editorial Board selected the winning story through a process of reading each story without knowledge of the author's identity and then scoring each entry. The story with the highest cumulative score was selected as the winner. The Editorial Board congratulates Donovan and all of the other entrants for their participation and excellent writing.

Leonard Holloway

Leonard Holloway was a bad kid even very early on. He might well have been a psychopath, had anyone ever been given the opportunity to examine him at length, but by the time he fetched up in a Georgia prison with a death sentence, no one had the time or the interest in psychoanalyzing him.

The first person Lenny Holloway killed was his own father. Lenny stepped from behind a dumpster and cracked the old man behind the ear with a two-by-four and he was dead before he hit the ground. Lenny had discovered that his father was sleeping with Lenny's 14-year-old sister, and that, so far as Lenny was concerned, was simply poaching. Lenny had been having sex with his sister since she was 12 and had been molesting her since she was six and Lenny was 10. His father, irresolute old drunk that he was, just happened to be the father of a really bad kid, and he paid the price for that and his own ugly predilections.

When his sister began dating a kid at school who was a football player and considerably bigger than Lenny, Lenny let her go and found a more age-appropriate girlfriend, whom he soon began abusing regularly. His sister got pregnant and moved away and left Lenny on his own, and he didn't work often enough and at any sort of employment that would bring him any reasonable money, so he moved out of the rented house he had shared with his miserable family in Coal Mountain, Georgia-his mother having left them all years ago-and took to the streets, burgling a convenience store here and there and moving along the state highways and county roads, dodging one police department or sheriff's office after another, getting rousted a few times for petty theft and once for burglary.

He did a five-to-two term at the state prison that specialized in younger offenders, then went right back to the road and his thieving ways. As he grew older and more withdrawn, he grew more aggressive when challenged, and he found willing girls or women harder to find; at least twice he might have been arrested for rape if he hadn't been faster than the local law.

In 1985, he decided to seek better climes and opportunities in Florida and set out from north Georgia, hitchhiking at first, and then, drifting west and south, in the middle-west Georgia town of Hogansville, he stole a van that he found idling outside a gas station. He drove till he ran out of gas near Lumpkin, Georgia, not too many more miles from the state line, in the hardscrabble-poor part of the state. Walking and hitching then on backwoods roads, always making south and maybe a little west, avoiding I-75 and the busier towns and bigger police departments, he looked for any opportunity to relieve his need for money, sex and drink. But he rarely went to sleep satisfied.

Leonard Holloway was a bad kid even very early on. He might well have been a psychopath, had anyone ever been given the opportunity to examine him at length, but by the time he fetched up in a Georgia prison with a death sentence, no one had the time or the interest in psychoanalyzing him.

He knew he was near Florida by the Spanish moss hanging from the oaks along the roads. The two children he saw playing in a field were curious about the gaunt figure that approached them. Lenny gave no quarter, and knocked down the boy, about five years old, with a single blow. The girl, about six, he raped and then strangled. Thinking better of leaving the boy alive, he broke his neck and dragged his body along with the girl's to a copse of trees near the fence-line dividing two pastures, and left walking again along the dirt road, again steadily south and west. He was arrested within two hours, and, frankly tired of the life he was living and terrified of the sheriff who sat glaring at him from the corner of the interrogation room while he was interviewed by a country-boy deputy about his own age, Lenny confessed, laughing and telling them everything. It was, in a way, a relief.

His trial in the Grady County Superior Court in 1986 took two days, since there was virtually no defense, other than the fact that the sheriff who had stared him down from the corner of the interrogation room was the grandfather of the two dead children. Trial counsel at least made an attempt to exclude it, but Lenny's confession was admitted over his attorney's frankly feeble objection. The conviction was appealed, and upheld repeatedly by the Georgia appellate courts with little or no comment for the first few times, and then, with some more attention given to the incongruity of the victims' grandfather being the sheriff, more was said in the appellate decisions upholding the verdict and the sentence of death. While the sheriff was, in fact, the grandfather of both children, who were brother and sister, he had not participated in the interrogation or interview, and since there was no photographic or video record of the statement-just a tape recording-and no evidence of any physical intimidation, Leonard Holloway's sentence to die by lethal injection was ultimately upheld, and he was sent to Georgia's death row at Jackson State Prison in Butts County. A proper Death Warrant was signed and the date set. Shortly thereafter, a Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in Atlanta.

In 2008, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia heard his appeal anew on the habeas petition, which was based on the involvement of the victims' grandfather, Grady County Sheriff R. D. Baker, who had since retired after more than 30 years as sheriff. The federal judge, a 40-year-old woman in her third year on the bench, expressed concern about the intimidating presence of the sheriff while the interrogation was conducted. She issued an immediate stay of execution, late in the afternoon of the date set for the execution.

Lenny's attorney Carla Browning sat in the lawyer's visitation room with her client. "The federal judge has issued a stay of execution,”said Carla.

Lenny was expressionless, but said, "That's good, but I'll miss that special-ordered last meal. "

But there's a problem, Lenny. I've been told that the governor will instruct the warden here to go ahead with the execution. "

But, he can't do that, can he? "

Well, Lenny, it's like, You can't arrest me-I didn't do anything!' but you get arrested anyway. Or, 'You can't convict me-I'm innocent!' but, you know, Lenny-the jails are full of innocent people. What he can do and what he can do legally are two different things.”

Governor's Office, Atlanta

Governor Reuben Haynes pushed a button on his desk set. Georgia's attorney general, John Wood, answered on the second ring. "Yes, Governor? "John, would you please come to my private office right away? Actually, John, I am asking you as a personal favor to me to come to my office and to remain in my office. I'm going to ask that you not leave my office, whether I am there or not, unless and until you hear from me personally. It would be very supportive right now, and I'd really appreciate it. Will you do that for me?

"Yes, governor, I'll be more than happy to be of any help I can. I'll be there in about five minutes.

"Make it two minutes. I'm about to hold a press conference and won't be here in five minutes.

The press room was full, the reporters having received a surprise call for a press conference by Georgia's governor, the first black man ever elected to that position in Georgia. Everything he did, of course, was news, and reporters would hurry to any event where this governor was speaking. Reuben Haynes, in the third year of what he hoped would be his first term, walked slowly into the room and to the bank of microphones, where WSB, WAGA, WXIA, FOX and the CNN and CNBC reporters as well as a few print reporters were waiting patiently. They all stood as he entered and approached the podium.

"Thank you all for coming. Please take your...