Forgotten in Life, Jail and Death

David Paul Hammer appears fated to die the way he killed his cellmate, Andrew Hunt Marti--inside a small prison room, his arms and legs strapped down, lying face up to a world that will do just as well without him.

Hammer murdered Marti nearly five years ago, slowly strangling him in his lower bunk in cell 103 of the Allenwood penitentiary.

With the federal government soon to begin executing prisoners again, Hammer at this moment is the first in line. He is scheduled to die in just a month, yet likely will exercise one final legal appeal to put off that date. Whenever he goes, he would be the first federal prisoner in more than a century put to death for killing a fellow inmate.

He sports a tattoo of “Mother” on his arm and he wants to be buried next to her, even though she caused much of his life’s anguish.

Two men, both federal prisoners, both destined to die.

Marti was the misfit, a wannabe, a terribly naive kid from California. He robbed a bank to get himself into a local street gang. Then gang members turned their guns on him.

Hammer was the first son of parents who, according to court documents, repeatedly beat, humiliated and sexually abused their children. He left home at 14. By 19 he would--but for a few weeks--spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Marti was young and tall and lumbering.

Hammer is 42 and balding, round-faced and flabby. A two-time escape artist, he claims to be tormented by multiple personalities. Sometimes he is a chimpanzee named Jasper. On the night he killed Marti, he was the evil Jocko.

In a letter written Oct. 15, he said of Marti: “He did not deserve to die and I certainly had no right to kill him.”

*

The United States has not carried out the death penalty since 1963, when it hanged Victor Feguer in Iowa for kidnapping and killing a doctor.

The Supreme Court knocked down capital punishment in 1972, calling it cruel and unusual punishment. But the court allowed the states and the federal government to rewrite their death-penalty statutes and Congress began to do so in 1988, reinstating the ultimate penalty, to be administered by lethal injection.

Today there are 20 men on federal death row. With all of the national attention now focused on capital punishment, it might have been expected that the revival of federal executions would draw great fanfare. But that has not been the case with Hammer.

For one reason, he is no Timothy J. McVeigh, Hammer’s colleague at the federal death row in Terre Haute, Ind., who like Hammer recently asked to be put to death. Hammer’s name is not widely known to the public, and his crimes, though many, do not resonate with the kind of revenge aimed at the man who bombed the Oklahoma City federal building.

Moreover, Hammer is a white man who killed a white man. There is no issue of racial disparity in his case like that seen with the many African Americans and Latinos who fill a disproportionate number of death row cells.

Then there is the crime itself. Federal prosecutors assigned to prison murders generally do not bother to go for the death penalty. More often than not, there simply is no outraged public demanding retribution.

But David M. Barasch, the U.S. attorney who oversaw Hammer’s prosecution, believed that he owed the victim and his family more than a murder conviction.

Noting that Andrew Marti might have been released by now, he said, softly: “To me, his life matters.”

*

When Robert Marti, the victim’s father, testified at Hammer’s trial in 1998, he broke down and cried, struggling to read his son’s last letter home from prison. At the defense table, Hammer was crying too.

The elder Marti owned furniture stores, one in Lodi, Calif., and one outside Salem, Ore. Andrew was the youngest of his four children.

“We thought he was a normal child,” the father testified. “And then about the age of 2, his mother was out in the kitchen one afternoon and all of a sudden Andy went to the floor.”

Two years later he was having as many as 200 epileptic seizures a day. Family members would hold his head, sometimes for 20 minutes, so he did not hurt himself.

Andy had severe learning disabilities. He took a special course to help him pass Army boot camp. Still, he washed out of basic training. He had disciplinary problems and could not get along with other recruits. He was busted for stealing candy in the barracks. And his father once testified that Andy was so clumsy with his weapon that “he could never qualify” as a soldier.

So Andrew drifted. He was gullible, very easily swayed by others. He lived for a while with his brother Michael and began stealing cash from him, $25 one time, $40 another. Later he lived inside his 1984 Plymouth, filled with his world’s possessions: $600 worth of clothes.

There were arrests: theft in 1990, robbery in 1991, federal bank robbery in 1992, when his accomplices tried to kill him.

“We got a call one evening that our son had been shot,” Robert Marti recalled in the Hammer trial. “His mother and I went down to the hospital. . . . He was perfectly coherent when I talked to him. I went in the room and I was not sympathetic and I perhaps was angry that he would do such a thing. . . . And I gave him the dickens.”

*

Hammer was born in 1958, 10 years before Marti. He grew up in Oklahoma and Texas. His childhood was horrific.

The family history was marked by mental illness, prescription drug and alcohol abuse, depression and suicide.

Hammer’s mother, Wilma Dean, died while he was in prison. His father, Johnny, lives in a retirement center in Oklahoma and could not be reached for comment.

The following account comes from court testimony, evidence in the murder trial and interviews with other family members:

The father repeatedly sexually molested his daughter. When David caught him, the father made him have sex with his sister.

Both parents beat their three children--with a shoe, a belt, a switch, an extension cord, their hands.

They also told them they were worthless. Once they drove the kids to Oklahoma City and tried to abandon them at a Baptist youth shelter. Another time, when a charity telethon was in town, they gave the kids jars and made them beg for money, then bring home the proceeds.

David’s mother was particularly cruel, friends and family recalled. She gave the children forced enemas if they misbehaved. She turned on the gas stove burner and singed their fingertips.

When neighbors complained about David’s favorite dog, she made him shoot the pet. When one of the family puppies was run over in the road, she punished David by putting three remaining puppies in a gunny sack and beating them to death with a shovel.

When Hammer heard his brother describe the dead puppies from the witness stand, he broke down and cried then too.

*

By 14, Hammer had left home. He would report later to Oklahoma authorities that he was sexually molested by an older man and that he once felt a strange urge to smother a cousin with a pillow.

He knocked around in odd jobs. According to his brother, he became addicted to heroin.

By 19, Hammer was in prison. His crimes were as horrendous as his upbringing.

High on PCP and threatening suicide, he went to a Baptist hospital seeking help but instead pulled a gun and took hostages, including a nurse and a pregnant receptionist. He gave up when a police SWAT team arrived.

Later, during one of his two prison escapes, he abducted a man named Thomas Upton, drove him to the end of an oil field road outside of Oklahoma City and forced him to disrobe. Then he shot him three times in the head.

Upton survived and later described Hammer as “crazy, man, completely; completely insane.”

Back in prison, he wrote threatening letters to judges. He fancied himself a jailhouse lawyer. Once he obtained a minister’s license and collected funds for his “church.”

His accumulated prison sentence slowly grew to 1,200 years. Under a contract with the federal government, the state turned him over to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. There his security is so tight that detention officers strip-search him four and five times a day. When he is moved, he is marched in handcuffs, leg irons and a belly chain.

When he was sentenced to die after pleading guilty halfway through his 1998 murder trial, Hammer told the court that, despite all of his childhood pain, he still loved his parents.

“They are not responsible for who I am or how I turned out,” he told the judge. “A lot of things happened along the way.”

Along the way he met Andrew Marti.

*

Marti went to prison for bank robbery in 1992. He had tried to join a black Bloods gang in the Portland, Ore., area, despite the fact he was a young white man with no real street sense.

To prove his mettle, he was directed to either kill a rival Crips member or rob a branch bank in Salem, Ore. He later told the court that because he “could not kill another individual,” he “chose the bank robbery.”

Thin, 6-foot-5, a ski mask hiding his face and a fully automatic 9-millimeter Lima pistol at the ready, he burst into the bank one chilly January day.

He leaped over the teller counter, scooped up the loot and made off in a maroon Dodge Omni. Later, at a rendezvous in a nearby industrial area, he and his gang confederates--fellows named “Rip” and “Smurf” and “Drak”--counted the money, just under $11,000.

But as Marti was returning to the car, he was shot four times in the chest and stomach by one of the others. He told the FBI later that he “played dead” and overheard the others laughing as they sped away.

In court, he pleaded guilty. “I am sorry I did this,” he scrawled across the plea form because his injuries left him unable to write or clench a fist.

His court-appointed attorney, Andrew Bates, described him as like a “puppy dog. . . . It was as if you were dealing with a kid with a junior high mentality. He didn’t have friends. He didn’t have much going for him.”

Marti was sentenced to 106 months.

The court’s pre-sentence report included a line from Marti’s mother, Patricia, who said her son wanted approval from others so desperately that he would “latch onto anyone who would give him half a smile.”

*

Marti walked into prison already a marked man. He was an informant who had rolled over on the gang members. In prison, he became known as a snitch, telling guards about other prisoners’ activities.

In retaliation, he was assaulted several times, once with a baseball bat. He was moved about the prison system, usually because he had been attacked, sometimes severely.

Marti’s prison file shows that officials were aware that “Mr. Marti’s life was in danger.” Even after Marti was examined by a prison psychologist, the doctor noted: “He was paranoid about his safety, but this seemed rational due to the previous assaults.”

Partly for protection, he aligned himself with a violent Mexican prison gang. He took a nickname, “Espanta Fajaros,” or “frightened birds.” He sported tattoos, including one of a scarecrow.

“He was afraid of what could happen to him there,” recalled his lawyer, Bates. “He was emotional about it. It was like a very young kid not knowing what was happening, and he was definitely scared of the retaliation.”

Once, Marti wrote the warden. “I’m scared for my safety. A man can’t learn anything while being stuck in SHU [Special Housing Unit]. I want to learn, I want to work, I want to be safe, warden!”

Three weeks before his murder, he sent his last letter home. He wrote it in block letters, and enclosed a birthday card for his 66-year-old father.

“Smile and be happy,” he wrote. “I know you feel that I’m a black sheep of the family and you’re right. I just didn’t like being told what to do and wanted to go on my own way, Dad.”

He added: “When I get out of prison, maybe we can start on the other foot.”

*

He died at 2:30 in the morning, April 13, 1996. He was 27 years old.

Marti was face up on the lower bunk. His arms and legs were strapped down by a knotted sheet, tied so tight that the coroner had to cut them loose. A sock was stuffed in his mouth. A separate, braided cord had been used to strangle him.

Hammer immediately confessed to the murder. He and Marti had been cellmates for just a few months in the prison’s special housing unit and Hammer has over the years hinted at a number of reasons why he killed the younger prisoner.

His most consistent story has been that Marti wanted to be transferred to another prison because he did not feel safe. To that end, Hammer convinced him that, if they could make it look like he was injured in a prison assault, he certainly would be moved. So Marti consented to be bound and beaten. But the ruse turned too violent.

Hammer knew of Marti’s reputation as a snitch and he told some confidants that he would silence his cellmate to win favor with other prisoners. Indeed, Hammer once bragged that he would “get Marti moved in with me and rock him to sleep.”

Hammer’s defense lawyers had their own theory.

They argued that he was tormented by his multiple personalities, torn between Jasper the friendly chimpanzee and the evil Jocko. In a later videotaped hypnosis session sponsored by his attorneys, Hammer blurted out: “Jocko killed him. Jocko killed him. I didn’t kill him.”

*

Regardless of why he killed Marti, Hammer from the start boasted that he did not fear the ultimate penalty.

He wrote out seven reasons for killing Marti, Nos. 1 to 4 dealing with Marti’s reputation as a snitch and Hammer’s desire to “make a statement.”

No. 5: “I do not fear the death penalty or anything else the government can do to me.”

No. 6: “Human life holds very little meaning for me as anyone can kill or be killed.”

No. 7: “Given the opportunity, I will kill again!”

In pleading guilty, Hammer told Judge Malcolm Muir: “The bottom line is I did in fact with these hands kill Andrew Marti. . . . The bottom line is I tied him up. I tied him to the bed and killed him.”

At his sentencing, he said: “This case began with the death of Andrew Marti and apparently it’s going to end with my own death.”

He rambled for a while, citing Shakespeare and T.E. Lawrence (the “Lawrence of Arabia”). “Our sins speak, but murder shrieks and that somehow seems appropriate to describe what happened to Andrew Marti.”

He added, “I see this as just the end of something that started way back. And I don’t see it as a . . . as a total loss. . . . He who dies pays all debts.”

On Sept. 20, he told the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia that he was dropping all of his legal appeals.

The appellate court took him at his word. Muir set his execution for Nov. 15.

A day later, Hammer wrote a postcard: “I have mixed feelings about it all, but after almost 23 years of continuous incarceration and no hope of ever leaving prison alive, I’m ready.”

*

In these final days, Hammer claims to have found religion, and was confirmed into the Roman Catholic Church.

In Washington, the Bureau of Prisons has also been busy, preparing its protocol for the executions. It has been a long time. There is much to be done.

Then in the middle of October, Hammer and his lawyers filed a clemency petition with President Clinton. He asked the appellate court to reinstate his appeal. And he asked Muir to set aside the Nov. 15 date so he could challenge the death sentence.

The appellate court said it would not hear any more appeals from Hammer.

Muir then set Hammer’s execution for Feb. 21, but will postpone that date if Hammer and his lawyers, as expected, file one final legal appeal by the end of this month.

Many believe that Hammer is toying with the system again, trying to make one more splash before he takes his final bow. His motives are as elusive as the man himself.

Yet he still can vividly recall his victim.

“Andrew was a son, a brother, an uncle, a gang member, a bank robber, an informant for the FBI,” Hammer wrote on Oct. 15. “Andrew was loved and hated. . . . He was a follower, not a leader.”

He added one thing more: “Andrew had numerous tattoos. One which comes to mind was two masks, happy and sad faces, with words beneath that said, ‘Play now, pay later.’

“Andrew paid in full with his life.”