No Clear-Cut Verdict Offered in This Case

Less than 24 hours after convicted double murderer Jaturun “Jay” Siripongs is scheduled to die by lethal injection in California, PBS will air an extraordinary documentary examining the life and crimes of Clifford Boggess.

Boggess, says reporter Alan Austin in “The Execution,” was “an artist, a musician, a Bible scholar and cold-blooded killer, a monster who spent his last years looking for redemption.”

On June 11, Boggess was put to death in Texas, which bumps off convicted killers by the dozen. In 1986, he had left behind two bodies in a couple of time-capsuled Texas hamlets that could have come right out of “The Last Picture Show.”

But from where did the killer’s demons come? And were they still festering inside him when he died, despite his contention that a newer, gentler Boggess had taken hold?

There’s potential sustenance here for both the eye-for-an-eye crowd and those believing that even the most heartless criminals can make dramatic U-turns in their lives while on death row. Yet don’t tune in this Tuesday night “Frontline” program expecting a polemic for or against capital punishment, especially as it relates to cases pending in such death-penalty states as California.

For one thing, Boggess had only the wickedness of his acts in common with Siripongs, a Thai citizen sentenced to die for the 1981 murders of a Garden Grove store owner and her clerk.

For another, “Frontline” correspondent Austin appears almost inscrutable during the three years of filming that make up this documentary and lead to the execution of Boggess, who had never denied murdering two elderly men.

Austin is the classic observer whose stony demeanor betrays no agenda beyond getting a story. “I came to Texas’ death row in 1995 wondering if there weren’t something important still to be learned,” he explains in a voice-over after noting how comfortable most Americans are with capital punishment. “I wanted to find a typical murderer, find out everything I could about him and his crime, and see if it still made sense to kill him.”

Did it? Ninety minutes later, there is no clear answer but much to chew on, including the capacity of Boggess to chillingly straddle what Austin calls “the horrible and the ordinary.”

Austin is especially interested in the makeup--the Why? and What for?--of his subject, although he naturally compares Boggess the bloodless monster with Boggess the intelligent, artistic, witty, charming, buoyant, prayerful, devoutly Christian death row inmate whom we meet.

And he wonders, ultimately, how much is an act.

Prison interviews are perilous. Was murderer Karla Faye Tucker as demure and saintly as she seemed--attaching a haunting face with dark curls to her crusade against dying--in her telegenic CNN interview with Larry King on the eve of her own execution in Huntsville, Texas, a year ago?

And were the Joliet State Prison inmates I interviewed as a cub reporter in Illinois many years earlier as earnest as they appeared? A prison chaplain had taken the kid reporter under his wing and advised skepticism, reminding him that he was speaking to shrewd, manipulative criminals on their turf, an environment with a reality apart from that outside the prison walls. The chaplain was right.

Whether in a cell, through bars or in an interview room with bulletproof glass between them, there’s a surreal flavor, too, to Austin’s many chats with Boggess, whom he calls “that rarity on death row, an admittedly guilty man.”

Just as profound, though, are Austin’s numerous meetings outside the prison with the killer’s family and former girlfriend, who turned him in, and with the still-grieving, still-bitter families of the victims.

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First to die was Frank Collier, an 82-year-old store clerk in Boggess’ hometown of Saint Jo. Boggess, then 21, stole a few hundred dollars from the store after repeatedly stomping on the old man’s chest and slitting his throat, a premeditated murder he describes to Austin with no more emotion than a chain smoker reading the health warning on a pack of Camels.

“[I] cut his throat and then just for overkill . . . I proceeded to stab him in the Adam’s apple and larynx area five or six times.”

Less than a month later, in Whitesboro, Boggess blasted Roy Vance Hazelwood twice with a sawed-off double-barreled 20-gauge shotgun only minutes after the victim had shooed his unsuspecting 16-year-old granddaughter out of the general store, perhaps to save her life.

What struck him, Boggess tells Austin with his usual curious detachment, was that the shooting was nothing like TV or Hollywood. “It was as if you had a puppet on a string, and someone just cut the strings. He dropped that quick. He just crumpled completely.”

Austin wonders: “How did the smart, talented, sweet little boy become such a man?” On the screen is a snapshot of that sweet little boy at age 4. So cute, so innocent, so cuddly. Was the evil already in him? Was it in him in high school when he was an honors student, star athlete and a pianist so accomplished that he was sought out to play in weddings? And was he able to exorcise it finally on death row, after finding Jesus and becoming a talented prison artist who worshiped Vincent van Gogh and earned money from the sales of his own paintings?

Boggess wasn’t fooling Jack Collier.

At age 95, Collier returns with Austin to where Boggess murdered his brother, Frank, and seems stunned after all these years. He still tends Frank’s beehives, and has told Austin that his goal is to outlive his brother’s slayer.

Back on death row, his appeals exhausted, Boggess is almost cheerily ticking off the days to getting the big needle on June 11, and he’s flashing his dark wit. “Home, sweet home,” he says about his small cell as if heading for two weeks in Hawaii. “This is what I’m leaving behind.”

Boggess tells Austin that he expects to see Jesus after dying, and that he expects to go to heaven. You wonder if he got there. And if so, whether the men he gruesomely murdered, Frank Collier and Roy Vance Hazelwood, were there to greet him.

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* “The Execution” airs on “Frontline” at 9 p.m. Tuesday on KCET-TV.