=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.