EXECUTION JOURNAL : Add Gas Chamber to the List of Marriage’s Stresses

In spite of it all, Janice Gay wanted a traditional wedding.

Determined to spruce up the drab prison cell that would serve as her chapel, she ordered flowers and a small, heart-shaped cake. She bought a long, lacy wedding dress--light blue, to match her groom’s state-issue uniform.

And then, on a Thursday in June, 1989, she went to San Quentin prison and married the man who, against all odds, had won her heart: Death Row inmate Kenneth Gay, one of two men convicted of the 1983 murder of a Los Angeles police officer.

“We fell in love behind glass,” Janice said, recalling when they first met, she and the man she calls “Kenny” sat on opposite sides of a dirty, plate-glass window, trading hellos on a prison telephone. Today, three years since they wed, Janice says their love has endured.

“I’d have to look a long way to find a man who has the depth my husband does,” she said. “We’ve broadened together.”

But stress takes its toll on any marriage. And for the women--and there are several--who have met, fallen for and married condemned men, these are very stressful times.

As the state prepared to carry out its first execution in 25 years, Janice Gay, founder and chairwoman of a support group called Wives, Families & Friends, is hearing from these women every day. She does not care what their husbands were convicted of. Usually, she does not even ask.

Instead, she talks to them about their anxiety--and about her own.

“I’m ending up this advocate for a lot of loose ends,” she said. As the governor and the courts refused to spare Robert Alton Harris’ life, she said she had “a feeling of sliding right off a cliff.”

Janice Gay, a nurse’s aide and artist who is in her 40s, is a crusader. She believes that her husband, now 34, is innocent--that he did not fire five bullets into Paul Verna, a 35-year-old Medal of Valor officer.

She also believes that if somehow more people could get to know the men on Death Row, like she has, the gas chamber would never take another life.

Many people think she is wacko. Her grown children from a previous marriage are embarrassed by her public statements, she says. Recently, one daughter told her she was not welcome to visit a new grandchild.

But her romance with Kenneth Gay, she says, is the most mature relationship she has ever had. Devotion, loyalty and trust--are not those the qualities most women want in a marriage? Well, she says, she has them.

And, although California does not allow conjugal visits, she says “there are intimacies. . . . I don’t see any reason why I would ever be happier with anyone else.”

She began corresponding with Gay in 1987, after she saw his name in a Christian magazine that listed prisoners who sought pen pals.

“I assumed they were all guilty and were dead already,” she said. “I was more concerned with where their souls were headed--up or down.”

But after six months of letter-writing, she found herself curious. Kenny Gay had a sense of humor. She liked him.

“He cared enough to get to know me,” she said. “That was what was so different about a prison relationship. We weren’t out in the world, distracted. We had time to really get to know each other.”

About a year after they exchanged their first letters, he got down on one knee in the San Quentin visiting room and proposed, Janice said.

After the wedding, Janice and Kenny posed for photographs, hiding his shackled wrists behind her bouquet. Then, Janice and a girlfriend got in her streamer-covered car and headed for Fisherman’s Wharf.

Passers-by stopped to ask about the sign she had pasted in the back window: “Just Married. They’re Trying to Kill My Groom. Abolish the Death Penalty.” Some were friendly, curious. Others yelled taunts.

Janice put a wedding announcement in the local newspaper, complete with a photo. She worked hard on the wording, wanting to be truthful, but not wanting to tell too much. The bride and groom, she wrote, resided in Marin County, where they were married. They hoped, she wrote, to take a honeymoon someday.

Recently, Janice has told Kenny about her grandparents, who were so committed to each other that when one died, the other passed away soon after. She would like it, she says, if the same could be true for them.

“I told him: ‘There’s two chairs in (the gas chamber). When you go, I think I’ll fight for my rights to sit beside you,’ ” she said. “He was furious. He wants to know I would have a life.”