I am a Killer (2018) s04e05 Episode Script

1
[grim instrumental music plays]
[man] This is where I live.
This is where I exist.
There is nothing matters to me.
There's nothing means anything to me.
I am who I am.
Just a killer.
These guards will tell you
I live in an administrative
segregation unit.
Until just six months ago,
I was in isolation,
in a one-man cell for almost two years.
What danger am I now?
What danger to society
is a 71-year-old man in a wheelchair?
They don't know what to do with me here.
That's right. They don't know
what to do with me here.
And I don't care.
[music crescendos]
[cryptic music plays]
[eerie instrumental music plays]
They say if there's no rage involved,
if you have one split second
to think about what you're doing,
it's first-degree murder in this state.
- [interviewer] Alright? How's sound?
- [crew member] Sounds good.
[interviewer] Yeah?
[Gary] If this was a second-degree murder
like it was supposed to be,
I'd probably be in a halfway house
somewhere like now,
on my way to a nursing home.
[birds chirping]
[traffic passing]
[blues-style music plays]
I was born in McDonald County, Missouri.
I grew up two and a half miles south
in Noel on a small farm.
Mostly what I remember
about those days are just
warm kitchens,
the smell of biscuits cooking.
Sometimes, uh, just a dog.
[dog barking]
I was five and a half years old
when my mother, father, and grandmother
were killed in an automobile accident.
[somber melodic music plays]
[bird squawks]
I was the only survivor.
I have no idea how that affected me,
losing my parents like that.
[birds chirp]
[dogs barking]
It was a very caring family at first,
but within five or six years,
my mother had begun to drink.
And the more she drank,
the less involvement
with the family she had.
My mother's alcoholism
had reached a point that, um
I remember her throwing
a vodka bottle at me one day,
and I walked out of the house
when I was about
Well, it was before my 17th birthday.
And I began to live
at the Redings Mill Inn at that point.
[grim discordant music plays]
The Redings Mill Inn,
downstairs was
a legitimate tavern operation,
and the other side of it, um
there were up to eight women there
at a time.
They were prostitutes.
[chuckles] They used to kid me,
joke with me,
but we'd usually always end every night,
whichever one of them didn't have a trick
was taking me back to her room.
I began to feel
that I had to protect them.
I had to take care of them.
This was part of my job.
They were my family.
They were my family.
By the time of my 17th birthday,
I was an actual pimp
for about six of the girls
that worked there.
[somber melodic music plays]
What it takes to really be a pimp
is understanding that your first
responsibility is to care for that woman.
I took some of these gals
off of a truck stop parking lot.
You know, I cared for them more than had
been previously known in their lives.
I believe that,
as well as I cared for them,
they began to care for me more.
You know, uh, some people
might not call that love.
Some people might call it, um
infatuation,
but they were there for me,
just as I was there for them.
[blues-style music plays]
Tammy was a prospective prostitute.
Around 7:30 p.m. that evening,
she offered to show me what she could do
on a good Saturday night.
We had gotten in the car.
At that point, Tammy realized,
"Oops. I don't have any cigarettes."
"Just stop down here
at this convenience store
and I'll run in there and get them."
That's where it all started on that night.
She came back very quickly.
I could tell when she came
around the corner into my sight
that she was upset about something.
She was very upset about something.
I'd started to roll my window down,
and even before I got it all the way down,
she goes,
"Gary, this ,
he pushed himself up against me."
"He pushed his groin
right up against my butt."
When I turned around to tell him
to get away from me,
he grabbed me by the hand
and pushed me back against the counter."
Because of what Tammy said to me,
I felt that he knew she was a prostitute
and he was trying to take her for his own.
That is totally unacceptable in my world.
[tense instrumental music plays]
It made me very angry.
When I saw him at the front of the store,
I said, "Boy, I want to talk to you."
He turned and ran.
And got into a brand-new Ranger truck.
I looked back at, uh, Tammy and said,
"Get in the car. Get in the car."
It didn't take five seconds
to catch up to him.
[music intensifies]
When we came to a stop
at Fifth and Joplin,
I was parked alongside his truck.
[music intensifies]
I remember Tammy saying,
"Oh my God, don't do this."
I said, "Don't worry about it, honey.
I'm going to kick his Black ass."
The Black guy saw me
getting out of my car,
and at that point,
he stepped out of the truck and had a
what was obviously, um, a bottle
wrapped in a brown paper bag.
And he said,
"Do you want some of me, old man?"
And I said,
"Nothing but your bucking ass, boy."
[eerie discordant music plays]
He swung the beer bottle.
It knocked me to my right knee.
When I rose, I rose drawing that blade.
I swung right up over his shoulder
into the side of his neck with that blade.
[music intensifies]
The arterial spray of blood that shot out
was probably four to six feet.
It was just like a garden hose
of water squirting.
And he went, "Oh my God Oh my God."
And I stepped back away from him
and watched him stagger back
towards the truck.
I returned to my car.
As I got in,
I threw the blade on the dash,
I pulled the door closed.
Tammy said, "Oh my God, what happened?"
And I said, "Nothing, honey.
It's just another down."
[insects chirping]
[eerie instrumental music plays]
We returned to the house,
packed some clothes.
I got a key to a trailer, a mobile home,
about 45 miles away.
And we drove down there
to spend the weekend
and just wait and see what would happen.
[somber melodic music plays]
This is my favorite of all-time.
Right here.
- [man] That's a good one.
- Yeah.
Man, he looks happy.
[woman laughs]
Right in the middle
of his two big brothers.
My name is Charley Kibby Johnson,
and I am the mother
of Jason Oscar Johnson.
I'm Oscar B., the father of Jason Oscar.
- Right there.
- Who's that?
[Charley] Everybody knew him,
even growing up.
As he was growing up,
they knew him by that smile that he had
because he was a happy individual.
In sports, he was always at the top notch.
[Charley]
University of Cincinnati Wildcats.
[Oscar] Yeah.
Go, Jason, go.
They would pretty much, uh, compare him
to some of the professional athletes.
- He was good. He was good.
- He was great. He was better than good.
[Charley] This is Jason's girlfriend.
That was the love of his life.
And I'm sure that had things not changed,
they would have been
husband and wife today.
[birds chirping]
[cryptic music plays]
We drove to Joplin.
And we got there
approximately 5:00 in the morning.
And they explained to us
that he had lost a lot of blood,
which had caused multiple strokes.
[somber melodic music plays]
We had to go in a conference.
Had to decide what to do.
[Charley] Oscar and I decided that,
"What good is anybody that's a vegetable?"
If you don't know who you are,
you don't know where you are.
Uh, that was not our son.
Our son was a vibrant, intelligent,
loving, and caring individual.
[quavers] We made the decision
to take him off of the life support.
I remember saying,
"Jesus is waiting on you."
"He's waiting on you,
and it's going to be okay."
And he took his last breath.
I was there when my baby
took his first breath,
and unfortunately, I was there
when my baby took his last breath.
[grim instrumental music plays]
[man] One could say pretty easily
that this is a good versus evil case.
Nothing suggested anything other than good
on Jason Johnson.
Nothing suggested anything other than evil
for Gary Black.
[music intensifies]
My name is Darren Gallup,
and in 1998,
I was the lead detective in this case.
A lot of people refer to this
as the Gary Black case,
but really,
this is all about Jason Johnson.
And he was the victim,
and so, it's really about him.
And this is
the Joplin Police Department here.
[eerie instrumental music plays]
Gary has to justify this
as saying it's a street fight.
So it would lend, obviously,
to the self-defense theory.
There was no intent or premeditation.
But that's just not
what the evidence shows.
There's just no way that this
can be conceived as a street fight,
which then caused Gary
to pull a knife in self-defense.
There was no evidence
that suggested any of that.
The evidence that we had
said that Gary Black
pulled up next to Jason Johnson
while he was seated in his vehicle,
gets out, pulls a knife,
and stabs Jason Johnson in the throat.
You can look in here and it's obvious
that he was sitting in the truck
when he was stabbed in the throat.
Blood would not have gotten
into this truck
if the altercation happened
outside the truck.
This is the knife used
as the murder weapon.
When somebody takes a knife out,
especially a knife like this,
and lunges it into the throat
of a person sitting in a vehicle,
the only result that they can expect
is for that to be a killing.
That is a first-degree murder.
That's premeditated murder.
[grim discordant music plays]
[Gary] I do not regret the death
of Jason Oscar Johnson.
He was a fake player.
He stepped into a game
that he knew nothing about.
Jason Oscar Johnson
knew she's she was a prostitute,
knew she was an open prostitute,
a free prostitute,
and he was trying to take her for his own.
I saw the video.
The video from that convenience store.
I saw him grinding his groin
up against her from behind
at the counter.
I saw her turn to face him,
and I saw him grab her by the hand,
push her backwards against that counter,
and say something to her.
He wanted to play "I can take care of you
better than anybody else."
He wanted to play "I am a pimp."
What he played was dead.
Well, it's just straight lies
is what it is.
[somber melodic music plays]
It just goes to show you
what type of a person Gary is.
He
will make stuff up
just to make himself look better,
and he continues to victimize Jason.
Jason Johnson was not a pimp.
There's no evidence to support it,
and you can just look into your heart
and know that that's just wrong.
So it just shoots, like,
one frame at a time.
Well, Jason is standing at the counter
buying what he's buying,
and then this is Tammy right here.
And this is where the alleged bump,
or whatever, occurred.
This is Tammy,
and this is Jason right there.
And that was it.
I mean, it was literally
a second and a half
of a of an interaction there.
So any claims
of Jason was trying to sexually assault
or do something inappropriate to Tammy,
it's obvious in the video
that that's not what occurred.
Even if Jason would have said something,
you know, why would anybody think
that that's okay
to stab somebody in the throat
just for bumping into your girlfriend,
or your wife,
or as Gary might put it, his prostitute.
These are all the tattoos on Gary Black,
uh, the day that I talked to him,
and this is a German Nazi SS tattoo.
I I really believe that
that Gary stabbed Jason in the throat
and killed him
because, uh, he was trying to save face.
And the fact that Jason was Black
and, you know, Tammy testified
that whenever, uh
Gary got out of the car and stabbed Jason,
and then he got back into the car,
he turned to Tammy and said,
"One 'n-word' down."
That certainly lent credence
to it being a racially-motivated crime.
[tense instrumental music plays]
Through our investigation,
we felt like that this,
one, was a first-degree murder
and that it warranted the death penalty.
The only question was
if the jury agreed with us or not.
You have to have certain aggravators
in the state of Missouri
for the death penalty.
Uh, one of those aggravators
is, uh, the the past history.
This was not the first violent crime
that Gary had committed.
[grim instrumental music plays]
[man] You ever had a dream
about the Bogeyman?
Gary Black's my Bogeyman.
This is where I was supposed to die.
But I haven't been up here,
oh, probably 35 years.
I'm sure that I'll have
nightmares tonight about it.
Back in March 1976, uh,
it was a Friday night,
and I'd, uh
picked up, uh, my girlfriend
and, um, taking her out to a date.
And I brought her up here.
We saw a car
pull up the hill.
They pulled in behind me and stopped.
They blocked me in.
Gary Black popped up in this window here,
driver-side and with a sawed-off shotgun.
And said they's police.
Told me to get out of my car,
so I got out my car.
He spread me eagle up against the car.
They picked up my billfold and keys,
and then they shot me.
[music intensifies]
I remember I could feel the blood
running out my side,
and I could feel the coldness
creeping up my arms.
Just cold, just like I was going numb,
but it's cold. I was bleeding to death.
[somber instrumental music plays]
I got over 40 pellets still in me.
I got two in my heart.
They had to remove half my lung,
had to remove my spleen.
[music intensifies]
If Gary Black hadn't been released
as early as he did
and put back out on the streets,
then he wouldn't have had a chance
to do what he did
on murdering another guy.
It It just floored me.
He should have stayed in jail.
I feel for the family on the other person.
And it's just so sad, so preventable.
[eerie discordant music plays]
[grim instrumental music plays]
[man] What good does it do to kill someone
for having killed someone else?
If all you do is kill the other person,
then the death of the one person
becomes meaningless.
Does Gary deserve compassion?
Every human being deserves compassion.
If your attitude is, is that there's
some people that are just so horrible
I mean, maybe you can't
find compassion for them,
and that's within you,
but they're human beings.
And no matter what they've done,
they deserve, uh,
a criminal justice system
that treats them fairly.
If you look back at Gary's 1976 sentence,
with respect to whether or not
Gary deserved a second chance
when he got paroled,
I think he did.
You know, we don't have
any magic compass to tell us
whether or not this person
is going to commit another offense or not.
It was right to see if he'd changed.
There's no other way to find out.
You know, you can go "what if, what if,
what if."
If he'd have been kept in prison,
maybe he wouldn't have been out
and maybe wouldn't have killed
Mr. Johnson."
You know, it's all "what ifs."
[music intensifies]
I think that a lot of the anger
that Gary had
that made him a dangerous person
when he was younger, it's gone out.
I don't think society is gaining anything
by having Gary incarcerated at this point.
The point of prison has come to be
keeping them away
from the rest of society,
where they might hurt people
or take people's property
or something like that.
It doesn't really accomplish much.
I I just don't think that there's
that much
much justification
for keeping him in in prison.
Gary's pretty harmless now.
[ominous instrumental music plays]
[music intensifies]
[woman] I think Gary Black
will always be a threat to society
or to any institution that he's kept in.
We've had some very manipulative inmates,
but none as truly evil as Gary.
My name is Becky Stevens.
My role at the Jasper County Sheriff's
Office, I am the current captain.
I learned about Gary Black
before I started working here.
I learned about him in the police academy
at the local university.
Um, they
They would teach courses,
and he would be the example
for their courses.
[grim music plays]
He had a, a pretty good reputation for
I don't know how to describe it, but just
for being dangerous,
I guess that's the best way to put it.
You know, we have some
behavior modification techniques,
which is basically loss of privileges
or not letting them out of their cell
for so many hours.
Gary didn't care.
There was nothing that mattered to him.
He didn't have anybody that came to visit.
There was nothing for him to behave for.
He would be aggressive
towards the officers.
He could get to you even,
you know, if he was locked in his cell.
You can still yell,
and then he would get the other inmates
to go and do his biddings for him.
That's just the way it was.
He lives on the torment of others.
I don't know if I could have words
to describe how racist Gary Black is.
If we placed an inmate of color
into that housing unit
where Gary was located,
he'd make their life a living hell.
[music intensifies]
Daily, all day long, the mental attacks,
the psychological warfare.
I believe Gary Black still
poses a threat to society, even in prison.
And an individual like Gary
who has no
no care for human life
is very dangerous no matter where he's at.
[music intensifies]
[somber melodic music plays]
[birds chirping]
[snorting]
[man] What do you do
with somebody like Gary Black?
He is the most dangerous person
that I have ever prosecuted.
[neighing]
My name is Norman Rouse,
and I was the lead prosecutor
in the Gary Black trial.
[snorting]
The fact that he got life without parole,
um, sometimes that's just the way it is
and the process,
but it was very hard to take.
[bird squawks]
[dog barking]
[Gary] Life without parole
makes me very angry.
If I did not have a sentence
of life without parole,
uh, I would have 22 years done
on this conviction,
and I would be very close
to be making parole
on a regular life sentence,
which, here in Missouri,
is considered to be 30 years
for the purposes of parole.
There are no incentives
to behave yourself.
There is nothing you gain.
There is no incentive
for a man with life without parole
to live in any other way.
[Norman] Gary Black's allegation that,
"But for life without parole"
um, "I wouldn't be violent,"
we can go back
and look at the prison records
long before he got life without parole.
In 1993, there's a report here
where, uh, he stabbed another inmate.
Uh, and in 1999,
he actually assaulted a jail officer
and, uh, caused damage to his left eye.
So these are just clear incidents
of, uh, his continued violence,
when life without parole was not an issue.
Keep in mind, we just have his violence
while he's in prison.
There's a lot of criminal records
out there, uh, that we haven't looked at.
So, this is just the, so to speak,
the tip of the iceberg,
simply out of the prison system.
[eerie music plays]
Keeping him in prison
with life without parole,
which a lot of people believe is,
is appropriate
as opposed to the death penalty,
as you can see from his records,
all these records,
it doesn't keep him from being violent.
I think he's very lucky to be alive.
In fact, all these records
vindicate and substantiate
that he deserves the death penalty.
[insects chirping]
[church music plays]
He is my friend ♪
He is, oh yeah ♪
Through thick and thin ♪
Oh, Lord ♪
And I can depend ♪
Oh, yes I can ♪
Oh, yeah ♪
When no one is there ♪
Good morning, everyone.
He answers my prayers ♪
We just thank God for this is another day
that God chose to wake us up.
[melodic music plays]
I do the prayer line every morning,
Monday through Friday.
Currently, we have about 67 people
that come on.
I believe my duty
after the death of my son
is to help others
who have experienced
similar circumstances and situations.
To help others realize
that life still goes on.
But God is always our refuge.
He's always our strength.
The anger that I had has changed.
Yes, he is. We thank God
As a Christian, I have to forgive.
It took a while, it took a long time,
but I can tell you sincerely
that I have forgiven him.
I have forgiven him.
I'm not in favor of the death penalty.
There's no real purpose
and there's no real gaining of anything.
If he was executed, he would not
have had time to feel remorseful.
I want him to think about it.
I want Gary Black
to spend the rest of his life
seeing the face of Jason Johnson.
[grim instrumental music plays]
[door unlocks]
[Gary] Had a little heart attack,
went to Jeff City for a stroke,
and just getting by, just getting by.
I've been given a type of medication
that thins my blood
to keep me from having another stroke,
and it results in easily bruising
around my eyes.
They say they're monitoring it
and getting it under control.
I don't know.
[eerie discordant music plays]
It should have been
a second-degree murder.
Jason Johnson
got out of that truck completely.
He hit me with a bottle,
and I stabbed him in the side of the neck,
that fast, that quick.
Just as he hit me, I stabbed him.
It was over.
[Darren] There's just no way that this
can be conceived as a street fight.
The eyewitness testimony
and everything that we put together
suggested Gary Black
pulled up next to Jason Johnson
while he was seated in his vehicle,
gets out, pulls a knife,
and stabs Jason Johnson in the throat.
That is a first-degree murder.
That's premeditated murder.
I could care less what he says.
I believe that I did what was right.
I feel that the CCTV shows
that a Black man
made sexual contact with his groin
against a white woman's butt,
and anything that happened after that
was legitimate.
[music intensifies]
I wanted to kill him the moment that truck
come to a stop at Fifth and Joplin.
I knew he couldn't get away.
It was cross-traffic.
I knew he couldn't go any farther.
"Now, it's me and you, ."
"You want to see how tough you are,
how big you are? Let's find out."
"Let's find out if you really want to play
in this real game."
Right at that moment, I knew he was dead,
and he died.
[interviewer] Are you a racist?
Definitely.
I am definitely a racist.
I grew up in the Klan.
I grew up around it.
[music intensifies]
[Norman] Gary Black is unique
in his disregard for humans and,
and treatment of humans.
Keeping him in prison
with life without parole,
which a lot of people believe is,
is appropriate
as opposed to the death penalty,
it doesn't keep him from being violent.
I've often thought, "What do you"
"What do you do with a person
like Gary Black?"
Sit here and cost
the state of Missouri money.
That's what I do with myself.
I sit right here
and cost the whole state of Missouri
every penny I can get
for the rest of my life.
Dying, even dying,
you people are going to pay for me.
[cryptic instrumental music plays]