Blackburn

Then the State of Texas charged him with murder again.

He was told that on the night that he and Roy-Boy had met, there had been a woman in the bedroom from which Roy-Boy had emerged. Blackburn had not known of her existence because she had been sick in bed for a week. She had been the sister of the apartment's other occupant, the woman who worked the night shift at Whataburger.

The sick woman had been tortured, raped, and killed.

And since Blackburn admitted that he had been in her apartment on the night of her death, he was accused of the crime.

Blackburn was astonished. 'I've never killed a woman,' he told his interrogators.

'Yet you've confessed to raping a woman,' one of them said.

Blackburn shook his head. 'No. What I confessed to was responsibility for that rape. And I won't let you use that as grounds to blame me for something else.' He turned to his attorney. 'You have to make them see my point.'

'What point is that?' an interrogator asked.

Blackburn looked at him.

'One sin,' he said, 'is more than enough.'

VICTIM NUMBER NINETEEN

The rape charge and one of the murder charges were dropped in April when Heather announced that she would not testify against Blackburn. It had taken her three and a half months of therapy and hypnosis, she said, but now she had grasped the reality of what had happened on the night she was attacked: Blackburn had not been her rapist, but her savior. While he had arrived too late to stop the rape, he had prevented the rapist from killing her. In order to do that, he'd had no choice but to kill the rapist. It had been justifiable homicide.

Blackburn read Heather's statement in the Houston Chronicle over and over again. His first thought was that she was overlooking some basic facts-such as that he should have killed Roy-Boy a week earlier, and that he had broken into her apartment in Roy-Boy's company. But then some of her words began to resonate in his brain.

'While I might wish that Mr. Blackburn had acted sooner,' she said, 'I cannot condemn him for not having done so. He is only human. He did the best that he could.'

That was the key. Blackburn had fallen short of perfection… but no one was perfect. To be human was to fail, and Blackburn could not escape his own humanity. So if Heather was willing to absolve his sin, he had to be willing to forgive himself for committing it.

The State of Texas, however, was peeved. To make up for the charges it had lost, it added a new rape charge to the remaining murder charge.

This pissed Blackburn off.

'I didn't kill that woman,' he told his attorney, 'and I didn't rape her either. I didn't even go into the bedroom. I didn't even know she was there.'

'I believe you,' his attorney said.

Blackburn found no comfort in that. 'It doesn't make sense. They've known all along that she was raped before she was killed, so if they were going to charge me with it, why didn't they do it when they charged me with her murder?'

'Because the physical evidence didn't support it,' his attorney said. 'The tests showed that the rapist had a different blood type.'

'Roy-Boy's.'

'Yes. But now the prosecution will argue that you and he committed the crime together-that you also raped her, but didn't ejaculate. You see, even though there's no physical evidence, the jury's likely to believe you did it just because the state accuses you of it. And that'll help the prosecution push for a conviction and a capital penalty on the murder charge.'

'But there's no evidence for the murder charge either,' Blackburn said.

The attorney looked down at his notes. 'Well, there's no physical evidence,' he said. 'But you've already confessed to killing a man in Goodland, Kansas, in 1981, and another in Kansas City in 1982. You haven't been charged with those crimes, but the prosecution will make a big deal of them anyway. Furthermore, you've admitted to being in the murdered woman's apartment on the night she was killed, and the police found a homeless man who'll testify to seeing you enter the premises within fifteen minutes of the time of death. That's close enough for a jury.'

'But I didn't enter with Roy-Boy,' Blackburn said. 'He went in through a window in the back, where the woman was. Didn't anyone see him?'

'Apparently not. But even the state admits he was there, so that's the route we'll take during the trial. We'll try to make the jury believe that he did it, and that you entered the apartment several minutes later.'

'Well, that's what happened,' Blackburn said.

'I believe you,' his attorney said.

This time Blackburn not only found no comfort in the statement, but heard that it was a lie. His instincts told him that if he was going to get out of this mess, he would have to do it himself. This time, he would listen to them.

The hearing on the new rape charge took place on Wednesday, May 14, 1986, Blackburn's twenty-eighth birthday. His lawyer arranged for him to be allowed to wear a suit and tie instead of jail fatigues, but he was transported to the courthouse in handcuffs and leg shackles. His lawyer was not allowed to accompany him in the van.

He sat on a wooden bench in the van's rear compartment. Three Texas Department of Public Safety troopers serving as guards sat on a bench across from him. They wore cowboy hats and mirrored sunglasses. They reminded him of Officer Johnston.

'You know that needle they stick in your arm,' one of the troopers said. 'Supposed to be painless, but it ain't.'

Another trooper nodded. 'It's as big around as a garden hose.'

'Sometimes they have to dig for twenty or thirty minutes to find the vein,' the third trooper said.

Blackburn watched them. They were pretending to be talking to each other, but their message was for him.

'Personally,' the first trooper said, 'I wisht they hadn't gone to the needle at all. It hurts some, but not enough. Not as much as this boy hurt that woman he killed.'

'I've never killed a woman,' Blackburn said.

The troopers turned toward him. Their mirrorshades reflected his face six times. The van went over a bump, and the reflections jiggled.

'Shut up, boy,' the second trooper said. 'Don't speak unless you're spoken to.'

'You were speaking to me,' Blackburn said.

The third trooper reached across with his rubber baton and jabbed Blackburn in the stomach. Blackburn saw it coming and tensed his muscles for it, then doubled over to make the trooper happy.

'Don't puke on them shiny shoes,' the first trooper said. 'The judge won't like it.'

'Judges frown on puke,' the second trooper said.

Blackburn sat up and smiled.