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Tuesday, March 4, 2014

=Death Row Saints=



Robert Henry Moorman

He killed Maude Moorman
while on a three-day
compassionate furlough.
She was his adoptive mom
and they hooked up
in an Arizona motel room
not far from the penitentiary. 
She was seventy-four by then.
And he was serving nine years to life
for kidnapping and molesting
an eight-year-old girl.

“Well I remember some sexual activity
but I don’t recall the strangling,
the stabbing,
the suffocating
or even the dismembering.
I don’t remember flushing her fingers
down the toilet.
I only remember playing with her breasts.
Next thing I knew 
I was carrying her around
and it occurred to me:
‘something’s wrong with mom.’
Maybe I had a stroke
since I’ve been in prison
maybe that’s why I don’t
remember anything.”

He was born to a fifteen-year-old prostitute
who died in a car wreck.
He was passed from foster home
to foster home
before he was adopted at age five
by the Moormans.
Just like that he was the son
of a successful Arizona businessman.

Lucky boy. He drooled,
walked funny,
looked and acted differently from others.
He was slow on the uptake;
he never fit in. He was teased
mercilessly. He lived outside
the outside of every circle.
He was the kind of child
only a mother could love.

Several psychologists testified
that there was overwhelming evidence
that he’d been sexually abused.
Was it Maude Moorman who
abused him?

“I don’t like talking about certain things,”
he said, testifying from inside a steel cage
during his clemency hearing.
“I know that what happened
to me was wrong but nobody
wanted to believe it”

“You can’t execute this man,”
his lawyers reasoned, “not only
was he abused as a child by the very woman
he killed, but he’s also
mentally retarded.”

Why did he wait so long
to enact his revenge?
Maude Moorman never abandoned him;
she visited him every day
in prison.
Is that why?

His attorney told the clemency board
that the state had never executed a person
who killed their abuser.

The state said:
“There’s always a first time.”

On February 29, 2012
he was executed by lethal injection
—it was a leap year.

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