ON REWRITING A MEMORIAM (For A Contest ??)
Dobie Remembered...
So, I answered a call for essays in a contest offering a $3,000 prize. It was a painful exercise as I had to drastically shorten it from it’s original 3,500-word length, and yet still try to retain the emotional impact of it. See, I like to try to tug on those little heartstrings people keep such a tight grip on. I hope that I managed to cram enough emotion into 1,080 words to grab those strings
This is a story about Dobie Gillis Williams, a young man Louisiana executed in 1999. Dobie was accused of a horrible crime and paid the ultimate penalty. But neither the crime nor the penalty captured the fragile wonder of Dobie’s life or the strength of the resolve in his spirit. I wanted to do that, and I hope that I did him justice.
Should I win the prize, I think I’ll donate some of the proceeds to Sister Helen Prejean and her ministry, and definitely visit Dobie’s grave.
Please feel free to tell me what you think.
Dobie Gillis Williams was born to Zino and Betty J. Williams at General Number One Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, on December 14, 1960, and departed this life on January 8, 1999, at 6:48 P.M.
—From the memorial booklet for the funeral of Dobie Gillis Williams
Night either comes very early or very late when you’re on death row, depending on how you look at it. At 2:30 a.m., it can very easily seem like 4:30 p.m.
When I served as an inmate legal counsel-substitute on Louisiana’s death row, my days began before dawn and stretched well past dusk. We worked crisis to crisis—no clocks, no reliable markers—because for condemned men, every delay, every stay, every slip of paper meant life or death. It was easier that way: keep moving forward and don’t look back.
On Friday, January 8, 1999, I watched every minute tick by. That was the day they carried Dobie to his execution. I was up at 3:30 a.m., trudging from my dorm through thirteen gates and bars—only three guarded—just to keep my promise: breakfast with Dobie on his final morning alive.
We had “shit-on-the-shingle” (chipped beef on toast), grits, and biscuits. The lukewarm coffee smelled faintly of sourness, and the hard as a rock biscuits tasted of melted butter and stale flour. Dobie nibbled three bites, then pushed the rest around his tray. Last night, he’d squeezed my hand through the bars like a lobster’s claw—his arthritis so advanced it bent his fingers rigid.
I simply held his hand. He needed something solid—someone—to signal that he was still alive.
He leaned on me for strength as he spoke to Paula Montoya on the prison’s phone. Paula’s voice trembled when she told him it was over—no more stays, no more appeals. They cursed Don Burkett, the Sabine Parish DA who’d ground every appeal to dust.
Six months earlier, in June 1998, Dobie had come within an hour of execution before the U.S. Supreme Court stayed his sentence. Then in November, they set him on the gurney—only for Governor Mike Foster to halt it at the last minute so they could DNA-test a blood-stained curtain from Sonja Merritt Knippers’s bathroom. Foster’s move was a political masterstroke—play hero if the DNA exonerates, or compassionate executioner if it doesn’t.
Later that night, around 7:30 p.m., two nurses and three guards led Dobie into the lobby across from my office. They photographed him holding a number board, weighed and fingerprinted him, all to confirm the state was killing the right man. Through it all, he chatted with the nurses—his laughter a cruel reminder of a life stolen too soon, just as Mrs. Knippers’ had been.
Watching him alive shone a harsh light on my own fate: I’d die in Angola, one of the 85 percent who rot out their natural lifespan. Dobie—a young man of thirty-eight—would die by state order. In the end, he hadn’t asked for a pardon; with ill-qualified counsel later disbarred and an all-white courtroom – bench, bar, and jury - the cards were stacked.
Back on Thursday, he’d asked me to eat breakfast with him on his final day. That morning, with the sky just lightening, he donned his “Fear Not” cap—three weeks’ constant wear. He’d learned from Sister Helen Prejean to battle fear like sin. Isaiah 41:10 had become his mantra: “Fear thou not, for I am with thee… I will uphold thee.”
When Warden Burl Cain came that afternoon to my office, I poured him coffee. He’d hosted a new coroner’s technician for dinner and told me how he’d described the execution to him, to calm his worries: “Four officers will escort Dobie from his cell. The strapdown team is well trained, each officer has an arm or a leg. If he resists, they’ll carry him. They’ll strap him to the gurney and it’ll be over quickly—then you’ll pronounce him dead.” He spoke as matter-of-factly as discussing the weather. I was appalled; Cain was serene. Before leaving, he slipped off to deliver a brand-new “Stone Cold” Steve Austin T-shirt to Dobie—an awkward farewell gift.
I tried to distract myself by attending a Latin American Cultural Brotherhood meeting at 5:00 p.m., but my eyes never left my watch. At dusk, I spotted an ambulance at the treatment center. EMTs unloaded a gurney—my heart sank. I excused myself to a corner, tears streaming as life went on around me. While the world ate a taco salad fundraiser meal amid laughter and Latin music, Dobie lay still and cold.
That night in the dorm, my friend Ron sat across the aisle. I sobbed, choking out memories: Dobie’s lobster handshake, the grit of his breakfast, the softness in his eyes despite the looming gurney. I cried for his fear, for the machine that ground him down, for God’s silence.
Two days later, Sister Helen’s email arrived—her ritual after executions. She wrote of Dobie’s grace: how he’d laughed over ice cream and chocolate bars, washed down with cold soda; how the Minnesota law firm that fought for him said it had been an honor; how, when asked his last words, he’d faced the witnesses and said simply, “I don’t have any hard feelings toward anyone. God bless everyone. God bless.” He climbed onto the gurney alone—no help needed or wanted.
She reminded readers that Dobie fit the death-row mold: a poor Black man from rural Louisiana, with ill-qualified counsel (who was later disbarred for misconduct) and an all-white courtroom at bar, at bench, in the jury room. She painted a portrait of a system too rigid, a governor too ambitious, a system that had failed him at every turn in his young life.
On January 14, 1999, Dobie’s homegoing service in Many, Louisiana, drew a standing-room crowd. His parents, lawyers, siblings, nieces, nephews—even a warden—came to say farewell. Forgiveness and love filled that tiny church more than any pulpit or powerful orator ever could.
I couldn’t attend, but I kept my promise: breakfast at 3:30 a.m. on the morning the state carried him to his fate. I stood by his cell, held his hand, and let him know he wasn’t alone until the last guard cuffed him and the elevator doors closed on his shuffle to Camp F.
Now, twenty-six years later, I still feel that lobster grip, still taste the greasy grit of our breakfast. I still hear Sister Helen’s words about fear and grace. I still see Dobie’s smile as he raised that “Fear Not” cap.
Death row taught me time is fluid—2:30 a.m. can feel like 4:30 p.m. What seemed endless became too brief. In those final hours, I learned that a promise kept can be more powerful than any reprieve—and that grace can exist even in the darkest halls of Angola.
And if you ever wonder whether a man condemned can rise above his fate, look at Dobie’s last words: forgiveness in the face of death. That is a freedom no prison can ever take away.