Sex, Drugs and Death: Testimony in Prison Killing

Under the guard of U.S. marshals armed with sawed-off shotguns to prevent a possible mass escape attempt, a half-dozen of the most dangerous men in the U.S. prison system were brought to Los Angeles last week to testify as witnesses in a prison murder case.

The courtroom security was the heaviest seen at the U.S. Courthouse in years, and the story told by the convicts assembled from prisons throughout the nation was every bit as rough as the reputations of the witnesses themselves.

There was an undercurrent of danger in the courtroom as the witnesses spoke about the prison killing and described the pattern of violence in which it was set.

Among the convicts themselves, however, there was an almost lighthearted mood as they took turns describing such prison realities as homosexual prostitution, heroin use and easy access to weapons.

In a sense, their testimony meant very little to the man on trial.

Willie Cruso Free, 35, was charged with fatally stabbing his prison boyfriend 67 times with a sharpened dinner knife in the recreation yard at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary on Sept. 18, 1983.

Free smiled at times as the testimony unfolded last week and yawned occasionally as his defense lawyer pleaded with the jury to acquit him.

He has little to lose if convicted of a second murder and little to gain if acquitted. Originally sentenced to five years in prison for threatening to kill his wife in 1976, he is already serving one life sentence for a 1977 prison murder, with little chance for parole.

In some respects, it was the same for most of the former Lompoc prisoners who came forward to support Free’s claims that he had acted only in self-defense.

“This is just a party for these guys. It’s always like this in prison murder cases,” said one U.S. marshal assigned to guard against a possible escape. “They’re in the toughest prisons in the country, and this is a chance for a trip to see their old friends.

“Some of them have escaped from prison before. They’re always watching for a chance to try it again.”

Warned of a possible attempt early in the trial, U.S. marshals requested that the witnesses all be brought into the courtroom in chains. That proposal was rejected, but armed marshals guarded all the exits as the convicts testified.

While most of the testimony had an almost casual tone to it, there were times when the witnesses showed anger.

At one point, Charles (Preacher) McEvoy, an alleged leader of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang serving a lengthy sentence at the nation’s toughest maximum security prison in Marion, Ill., exploded in rage during sharp questioning by Assistant U.S. Atty. James E. Berliner.

McEvoy, who denied membership in the prison gang, had testified that he had been asked by the victim of the stabbing, Louis Ronald Codianni, to provide him with a knife but had turned him down because he was a “pervert.”

“Isn’t it true that you’re a punk at Marion?” Berliner asked, using the prison slang term for a submissive homosexual. “Isn’t it true that at Marion you’re known as Barbara?”

Sputtering with rage, McEvoy angrily denied the accusation, sprinkling the courtroom with obscenities and shouting back that the prosecutor was a homosexual, not himself.

As the trial began before U.S. District Judge Laughlin E. Waters last Tuesday, Berliner claimed Free killed Codianni because Codianni had decided to break off their relationship.

Testimony revealed that Codianni, 33, a “punk” nicknamed Lady Claudine by other Lompoc prisoners, had initially agreed to provide sex to Free as often as three times a day in exchange for protection and a steady supply of heroin.

Just three weeks after arriving at Lompoc and establishing his relationship with Free, however, Codianni found a new drug supplier, Berliner said.

According to the testimony of Lompoc guards and other prison officials, Free was found standing over Codianni in the prison recreation yard with the knife in his hand and continued to stab him repeatedly until unarmed guards finally persuaded him to stop.

‘Let That Punk Die’

After the stabbing, according to the Lompoc guards, Free stopped another prisoner from bringing a stretcher for Codianni, throwing the stretcher over a fence and shouting, “Let that punk die.”

Although Free finally agreed to leave the recreation yard, according to testimony, he held on to the knife while he was escorted to a detention cell, pausing at one point to again shout to other prisoners: “I just killed my punk, and I still have my knife.”

Only when Free was inside the prison’s segregation cellblock did he finally surrender the knife to a guard he trusted, Lt. Robert Perdue.

Perdue testified that Free explained: “I always keep the knife when I kill someone until I get back to my cell.”

Ronald Sears and Morris Johnson, who escaped briefly from Lompoc in 1983, testified that they supplied the knife to Codianni, not Free. Others testified either that they heard Codianni threatening to kill Free or actually saw Codianni initiate the fight.

In addition to the murder, the jury also heard testimony on charges against Free that he assaulted three prison officials on March 20, 1984, during a disturbance in the segregation unit at Lompoc that began when the prisoners complained that their breakfast was cold.

‘Can’t React to Everything’

Lompoc guard Paul Linden testified that he was squirted in the face by one prisoner with a mixture of urine, human feces and shaving cream but did not immediately respond.

“I can’t react to everything these guys do,” he said.

Later, however, Linden said he was squirted with the same mixture by four prisoners and called the prison “reaction squad” to respond to the trouble. In an ensuing skirmish, with guards and other prison officials slipping on the messy cellblock floor, Free allegedly attacked the reaction squad with another sharpened dinner knife, inflicting minor wounds on a prison paralegal worker.

The former Lompoc prisoners called by Brian Robbins, a federal public defender, disputed the claims that they had squirted Linden and said the Lompoc guards beat up Free because they regarded him as a troublemaker and wanted to make an example of him.

As the case finally went to the jury Friday, Berliner questioned the honesty of the defense witnesses and suggested that they were testifying primarily so that they could have a brief vacation from their normal prison routines.

“Did the defense witnesses look like they were having a good time?” he asked, noting that many of them were laughing during their testimony. “Their appearing before you gave them a lot more enjoyment than being in Marion.

“It’s a sham. They are doing the defendant a favor. You cannot rely on the defense testimony at all.”

Heavy Security Noted

In response, Robbins argued that the defense witnesses were not at all pleased with the heavy security guard that they had been under while being transported from their respective prisons to testify for Free.

“The government would have you believe the people who saw this are the worst trash in the world,” Robbins said. “The government says when you’ve got these inmates who are here just as a joke, they will say anything.

“The U.S. government chooses to run the highest security prison in the Western United States with over 1,000 inmates with only 30 guards on a normal shift. What was going on in that place was madness. There were no guards around when this incident took place. They were five minutes away. Who else could witness this crime except the prisoners? “

After testifying Thursday, Free’s defense witnesses were immediately returned to Lompoc, where they had been housed for security reasons while in California. They were then flown back to their respective prisons.

Jury deliberations, which began Friday, will resume Monday. Free, who is now serving his life sentence at Marion, is being held at the federal prison at Terminal Island under heavy security.