..  ..Jim Vanderbilt ...No 560 ...Ellis I Unit, Huntsville, Texas ...Year of Birth 1952 ...Marital Status divorced ...Children unknown ...Date of offense April 1, 1975 ...Sentenced to death May 26, 1976 ...Status Under Appeal Click on the image to view a larger version. Scroll below for an account of the session.

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According to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Jim Vanderbilt, a probationary police officer, abducted 16 year old Katina Moyer at gunpoint from an Amarillo high school on April 1, 1975. He handcuffed her, took her to his house, & shot her in the back of the head. Vanderbilt, who had completed 3 years of college, had been fired a few days before the crime, for allegedly striking a traffic violator with a flashlight. When I started this project I sought out Danny Lyon's seminal book, Conversations with the Dead (1971). After Texas I was startled to discover that Lyons, too, had taken photographs at the Texas Department of Corrections. As we turned our van onto the dirt road leading to the Ellis I Unit, we were shocked to see the inmates performing the same ancient rituals Lyons had shot 20 years earlier. To my amazement, I was allowed to go into the fields to photograph "the line". Nothing seemed to move in the heat but the long rows of men manually chopping grass. Death row is like the nuclear reactor core of a prison. When you enter you are slowly contaminated. No one leaves untainted. In this cauldron Jim Vanderbilt resides. Because he was once a cop, he has been ostracized by the prison community. This mild-mannered man is treated badly by everyone: the inmates hate him because he was one of the enemy; the security guards distrust him because he went bad. "And in here, there's no such thing as an excop. You're a cop....I cannot deal with the guards on a friendly basis. They cannot stand in front of my cell & talk to me....But it causes me to have to be rude to people that in other circumstances I would be friendly with.... Anytime someone snitches, I'm on the top of the list for-for possibilities. And because of it, one, I make it my business not to know someone else's business....I'm eliminated. And if no one's standing in front of my cell, then I couldn't have said nothing to them. And I haven't talked to someone off the wing....Because everyone knows & no one forgets." Talking to us meant that Jim was putting himself at risk. The unwritten rule on death row is to remain invisible: do your time without fanfare & live longer.

Jim Vanderbilt once petitioned for & won the right to grow his hair long. (He claimed his religion did not allow him to cut it.) For a time he was extremely hirsute; now he was clean-cut & scrubbed. His appearance is average: medium height, medium build. But for many on the Row, ordinary is a disguise, a cloak worn to make them appear no different from the rest of us. Some inmates may even convince themselves that they haven't changed, when in fact they are forever changed. The decision to kill is a one-way street that reconfigures the psyche. And according to Vanderbilt, once on death row there's another transformation. "And one of the tragic things about the death penalty is that they almost never execute the man they convict or the man who committed the offense. Just assume the person's guilty. They...everyone changes in time. Well, death row escalates that change either for good or bad. It doesn't always-it's not always change for good." Jim ate his meal while answering our questions (he had fish, "the best meal of the week"). While Jim wolfed down his meal, I shot pictures. Jim Vanderbilt is an aristocrat among inmates. Convicted of murder in the course of a kidnapping, he has survived well past the average life expectancy (just over 9 years) on death row. In fact, he has been there over 20 years. "And I'd never been arrested before. Just, I guess I started at the top....Just barely 22 when I got arrested. And I was basically a student all my life. I got out of high school, right into college &, & I married about 9 months before I got arrested....Kind of feel like in a lot of ways I've never lived a life. The...my way of dealing with prison is to eliminate the "out there." In the group of inmates we met in Texas, Jim does not stand out. In most of his conversations he failed to reveal himself, & he never revealed how he felt about his victim. He tended to confuse innocence with guilt. It is interesting that the states & counties where lynching was most prevalent are today the ones that rely most heavily on the death penalty to solve their problems. The death penalty is not a solution to our violent culture; it is a symptom of it. Harris County, which encompasses the city of Houston, has been responsible for more executions in the US in the last 20 years than any other entire state except Texas. Huntsville's 7 prisons are its principal industry.