One Final Con

Deep in the iron bowels of Arizona’s death row waits el tigre grandote. The big tiger turns 90 this year. He is the oldest condemned man in America, maybe the whole world. And like the wild beast he claims to embody, Viva LeRoy Nash wants to roam free. He awaits his release by the hand of God or the vengeance of man, whichever comes first, inside Cell 39.

Nash has spent 65 years of his life in prison. Twice he has escaped, making his most recent dash for freedom at age 67. That was in 1982, in Utah. While on the lam, the lanky convict stole a car, robbed a gun dealer, went to Phoenix and acquired a senior citizen’s bus pass. Within three weeks, he killed a man—his second murder—during a coin shop holdup out on Thunderbird Road.

But Nash’s final con, if he can pull it off, may go down as his greatest caper of all. With his legal appeals creeping through the system for 23 years now, he hopes to cheat the state executioner by dying in his sleep, maybe at 100, a gaunt old man at peace at last. Until then, living in near-total lockdown, plagued by strokes, heart ailments and high blood pressure, he’s followed by the specter of death.

After I contacted him late last year, Nash began writing several letters a week to me, some 20 pages long, always neatly printed in black ink, railing against judges, prosecutors and prison guards. At first he played the victim, describing himself as forlorn and friendless, as “one soon-to-be-forgotten old man on the miserable Arizona death row.” But within a few months, frustrated that I was not buying his story, he lashed out at me, too, and vowed to outlive all of his persecutors. “This old bastard won’t die,” he wrote.

Do not pity this old man. I don’t. He is a killer. No matter what Nash says, the coin-shop clerk did not fire at him first. Neither the eyewitness nor the bullets he fired execution-style into Gregory West, a 23-year-old newlywed, support his claim of self-defense.

There is an old saying that justice delayed is justice denied, and it has merit. Nash knows it. On every morning that he rises from his bunk, he maintains the upper hand in a national debate over whether society really wants to execute someone his age. The U.S. Supreme Court recently banned the execution of juveniles, and the mentally ill also are spared. What about the elderly?

The Arizona Department of Corrections’ death house is a low gray building among a cluster of state correctional institutions an hour’s drive east of the Phoenix sprawl, on the same sort of sand and scrub that Nash knew as a boy on the Utah frontier. The son of a devout Mormon mother who christened him Viva after a Spanish ancestor and a father who routinely belt-whipped him, he was in trouble by age 7 for stealing bicycle parts and potato chips. While still a teenager, Nash was sent off to Leavenworth prison in Kansas, where he learned bad-guy vocational skills from the best: older felons.

As a free man again briefly, he was married in Salt Lake City, fathered a son and worked as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman and a mechanic. But the upright life was fleeting. “Otherwise, my whole life has been wasted,” Nash tells me during a phone interview.

Nash held up a dance hall. He robbed a gem store. He killed a man, received a life sentence and was sent to a Utah prison, his last address before Arizona’s death row.

When given the opportunity, Nash leaves the 8-by-12-foot concrete and steel Cell 39 to shower or breathe fresh air in a small recreation area, where he can bounce a ball or turn his failing blue eyes toward a mesh roof and a patch of desert sky.

“The old man?” says death row guard Oscar Garcia. “You have to help him walk back and forth to the shower. Make sure he doesn’t fall.”

Former Deputy Warden Madeleine C. Perkins sees Nash as harmless. Until recently it was part of her job to help supervise executions, though it has been five years since a hearse carried away the body of a prisoner killed by lethal injection. Of Nash, she laments, “It’s a waste. Really, what’s the risk there? What danger is there in a 90-year-old man?”

Even Warden Judy L. Frigo believes that Nash makes a better role model alive than he would dead. She describes him as a “convict,” far different from the state’s 34,000 “inmates,” many of them eager to clash at the slightest provocation.

“A convict like Nash,” Frigo says, “if he gives you his word, it’s his word in prison. It’s good. And he exists in that certain pecking order. There’s a mutual respect. . . . We always say we wish we had more convicts.”

Another old-timer here, a 74-year-old who murdered his wife’s daughter in 1985, developed Alzheimer’s disease on death row. His sentence has been stayed indefinitely, explains Kent E. Cattani, chief counsel in Arizona’s capital litigation section, because the law mandates that a prisoner must understand why he is being executed.

But age is legally irrelevant. “It does not give you a pass on the death penalty,” Cattani says.

He notes that by the time Nash’s appeals crawl through the federal court in Phoenix to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, he could be 95 or older. And he could then turn to the U.S. Supreme Court. “We don’t look forward to any execution,” Cattani says. “And we’re not going to be disappointed if he died beforehand. It’s certainly likely.”

Nash’s current lawyer, Thomas J. Phelan of Phoenix, believes the age factor could save his client’s life. Nash is hard of hearing, wears thick glasses and has drooping skin that hangs on him like melted wax. His arthritic, liver-spotted hands shake. Nash says he has had four “little strokes” and three heart attacks—”the last one almost did me in”—and takes seven prescription medicines a day.

“He’s a disarming, doddering old man,” Phelan says. “When I go to see him I have to scream at him to be heard. He talks back to me in this old rasp, says that everyone is out to get him. He’s paranoid about the government.”

That might be Phelan’s best bet—to prove in federal court that, like the death row inmate with Alzheimer’s, Nash’s age and years in solitary confinement have cost him a degree of sanity. Even if Phelan can get Nash’s sentence reduced, his client is not going anywhere. Even if he ever got out of Arizona, there is still that life sentence he escaped from up in Utah.

Says Phelan, “His execution would be a horror show. Think of the worldwide publicity. We’d be the laughingstock of the world. Old people, mentally retarded people should not be strapped down to die. What purpose is it to end his life now?”

Nash occasionally heard from his son, until he died in 1989. His 87-year-old ex-wife, Beth, had no idea that Nash is the oldest man on death row in America. “Oh, I think that’s kind of horrible,” she says when I share the grim news over the phone.

John Johnson, an Arizona State University criminal justice professor and anti-death penalty activist, visits Nash and sends him $100 every three months for sodas and cookies. He bought him a subscription to the Sunday New York Times and a TV that Nash tunes in to sports and nature shows. He particularly likes watching women’s tennis.

I heard about him late last year, after the state of Alabama executed an all-but-bedfast two-time murderer, 74-year-old J.B. Hubbard, who suffered from dementia. Amazed that Nash was 89 years old and still hanging on, I interviewed him and then started a regular correspondence by mail. Once or twice a week, starting in November, I sent a letter to Cell 39, trying to learn more about the man living inside. Three or four times a week, he answered back.

His responses often strayed either into Wild West yarns of Mexican smuggling and derring-do, recollections filled with flowery prose about being “bushwhacked and shanghaied,” or into paranoid rants about the justice system.

Once, to gauge how much of the world he had missed, I gave him 20 questions. It turns out he last voted for Eisenhower and has no idea what a latte “is or means.”

iPod? “Maybe a large shipping box?”

PC? “Post-conviction.”

DVD? “The little recording discs shoplifters like to steal.”

Botox? “Probably something toxic to do with botany or terrorism?”

Sometimes in his letters Nash fantasized about freedom. He would wear spiffy black shoes and drive a new green Buick. He would listen to soft Spanish love songs, at home with a Spanish or Nordic woman who cooked like his ex-wife, only without the salt. He would keep an M-1 carbine or maybe a 9-millimeter for protection. Something that “doesn’t kick,” he wrote. And he would breathe the outdoors again. “Forest smells.”

In other letters he recalled sitting through silent movies and learning to read the words along the bottom of the screen. His first books were Tarzan adventures; he loved the jungle stories. Even today, after nearly a century, he still fancies himself roaming the woods. He calls himself “el tigre grandote,” the big predator stalking the wild. “Like a hungry tiger, I should go hunting for a while,” he wrote.

Gregory West’s widow, a beautiful woman with crystal blue eyes, remembers everything about her first husband’s funeral in 1982.

The Chapel of the Chimes, in their suburb north of Phoenix, was packed. His entire softball team showed up. So did co-workers from the Moon Valley Coin and Stamp store, the owners too. The grandmother who raised West had fainted in the emergency room on the morning of the shooting, but was well enough to attend. West was laid out in blue slacks and shirt. He didn’t own a suit because the newlyweds had just bought a starter home, drove an old beige Chevelle and were strapped for cash.

West’s widow, Cindy, asks me not to reveal her new last name. She does not want me to say where she lives or mention much about her two teenage sons. Nash still frightens her. “He’s escaped from prison in the past,” she points out.

When we meet in a dark Italian restaurant in a town deep in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest, she asks to see my identification before sharing a few faded snapshots from the couple’s courtship and Valentine’s Day wedding. There is Greg in the rented tux, with the curly hair, the brown eyes, the chubby cheeks, the broad smile. He was the bright kid who rarely had to study hard at Moon Valley High School, where he played on the baseball team. He dreamed of becoming a psychologist someday, but not until he was 40. He was, Cindy says, “a free spirit.”

They kept a Quaker parrot and a poodle-terrier mutt. They drove to work together because her job at the Ambiance Travel Agency was just two doors down from the coin store. For a while Greg took up reading the Book of Revelation, particularly the part about the Rapture. On one of their last nights together the couple discussed buying life insurance.

Over the years Cindy gave up worrying about the fate of Viva LeRoy Nash. In court, her husband’s killer had turned around and glared at her after his sentencing and she had glared right back, full of hatred. “He changed my life,” she says. “I was married and a widow at 23.”

On the morning of the murder, Nov. 3, 1982, Nash walked to the counter of the Moon Valley coin shop and announced, “I’ll take it all.” In his hand, co-worker Susan McCullough later testified, he gripped a blue-steel revolver.

“Then I saw him shoot Greg,” she said.

As he fell off his stool, West reached for a gun that the owners kept under the counter for protection. He had never handled a firearm, and his return shot went wild. Nash then walked deliberately around the counter, stood over West and shot him twice more.

“Please God, no!” he screamed. “Please God, don’t shoot me!”

Nash hurried outside but was quickly tackled by onlookers. Cindy rushed inside and found her husband’s blood spreading across the floor.

There was no trial; Nash pleaded guilty, he says, because prosecutors promised not to bring up his record in court.

At his sentencing, Judge Rufus C. Coulter Jr. reviewed Nash’s confession. “I feel sorry for the poor bastard,” Nash had told Phoenix detectives. “He shot at me.”

Nash also blurted out to the detectives that he deserved the death penalty. “I’m old and useless. They ought to put old people to sleep like dogs.”

The judge considered a pre-sentence report that discussed Nash’s abuse as a child, his turn to crime and his prison stints in Kansas, Connecticut and Utah. It concluded that Nash, “for a number of reasons, is a very dangerous individual.”

Also at the sentencing, prosecutors read his criminal record, the incarcerations and attempted escapes, thefts and assaults, the murder of the Utah man during the botched jewelry store robbery. Ten years into his life sentence for that crime, Nash had become eligible for a state forestry prison job outside the razor wire. As he told me, “I just walked away.”

The judge also reviewed psychological examinations in which Nash spoke of hearing “spiritual voices,” people he identified as Esperanza and Darlene. He claimed Esperanza warned him that West was reaching for the gun under the counter. While prosecutors would dismiss this as convict hooey, defense experts found that “these experiences signified that he was psychotic” at times.

The experts also noted that he had nicknamed himself el tigre grandote, and that he considered himself “hungry and on the hunt” when he entered the coin shop.

“When I’m broke and hungry, I’m related to a tiger in the jungle, and when I go hunting, I don’t think that anyone has the right to stop me,” Nash told Dr. Donald F. Tatro. “It’s my right to kick them out of my way. It’s my jungle.”

When he escaped from the state forestry job, three weeks before he killed Gregory West, he told Tatro, “I figured I’d go back to the natural law, the universal law. I thought, ‘Let’s see if I can’t make it living that way for real. I’m a tiger. Let’s be a tiger.’ ”

About three years after arriving on death row, Nash applied for a commutation. He also began insisting that West had fired first. “Of course I hated to see what happened,” he wrote in a letter to me. “But the guy tried to bushwhack me and the state has really, really covered it all up. It was a cold bushwhacking job.”

His lawyer, Phelan, has been trying to get the state to reduce the death sentence to life in prison because Nash is old, mentally impaired and was given poor legal advice about pleading guilty. Word around the state capital in Phoenix is that a gentleman’s agreement is in the air, and that the government foresees a day when the old man simply does not answer his morning bed check. To die quietly lets everyone off the hook.

The oldest man on death row must think he sees a chink in the concrete wall too, that his final con is working.

“I was always the last one to get caught,” he says. “And the first to get away.”