The Death Penalty: I Don't Think I'm Guilty , Claude Wilkerson

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Texas law-enforcement officials and Claude Wilkerson, 28, agree on one point: when the murder for which he was later tried, convicted and sentenced to death took place, Wilkerson was locked up in Houston's Harris County jail. Beyond that incontrovertible fact stretches a tangle of contradictions. Two of Wilkerson's confederates have been tried for the same murder and now face execution. A fourth man, who admitted being present at the scene of the crime, is serving a life sentence, a leniency granted for his cooperation with investigators. Says Wilkerson from his cell on Texas' death row in Huntsville: "I don't think I'm guilty of capital murder, and I don't think the court proved I was."

Wilkerson's road to extraordinary trouble began with an ordinary childhood. The son of a pipefitter, he moved with no particular distinction through his education. He recalls, with irony: "In a high school science class we took a straw poll on the subject of capital punishment, I voted in favor of it." Wilkerson dropped out of Mesa College in Colorado after one year, married, divorced and knocked about in a couple of ill-fated business schemes. He then went to work for Houston Businessman Don Fantich, who local police suspected was an operator in the penumbra of the underworld.

On Jan. 23, 1978, Fantich disappeared, along with a woman who ran a jewelry store, which Fantich owned, and an apparently innocent bystander, Dr. William Fitzpatrick. Police picked up Wilkerson for questioning. While he was in custody, all three missing persons were shot and buried about 100 miles west of Houston. From testimony pieced together from a variety of sources, police found the bodies and deduced that the victims were part of an extortion and kidnaping scheme that Wilkerson had masterminded. While Wilkerson owned up to the plot, he denied any involvement in the murders. Prosecutor Don Stricklin scoffs at this: "He could have told us earlier and saved those people's lives."

Wilkerson's first trial ended in a hung jury, but the second resulted in his conviction. [For reasons of strategy, prosecutors limited charges to the murder of the doctor.] Says Sherman Ross, now a judge, who represented Wilkerson both times: "The district attorney's office good-old-boyed him into a death penalty." For his part, Wilkerson tries to make the best of life on death row: "It takes a great deal of personal effort to not become hard within yourself and hate the free world."

A pudgy soft-spoken man, he has used his abundant time to polish his skill in drawing. Late last year a friend in New York City asked Wilkerson to send samples to be sold at a party. The prisoner netted $200 and has since sold some other artwork. He uses a typewriter in his cell for a widespread correspondence with, among others, some leaders in the American Indian movement. A grandmother of his was a Catawba Indian, and Wilkerson has grown intensely interested in this heritage and its culture. He has taken an Indian name, Ches-ne-o-na-eh, which translates as "the man who kills the wolves." Wilkerson suggests another meaning that this name could convey: "a beautiful being in a scarred world."