Rest In Prison: The Murder of Timmy

For most Pittsburghers, the news of Timothy Boris' death came in about five seconds on the TV news or in a two-inch story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Inmate, age 40, strangled."

Maybe you momentarily imagined the horror of being murdered in prison. More that likely you didn't think it was such a big deal. A dead convict doesn't inspire much sympathy.

I found out about Timmy's death when me and my roommate, Madge, were walking out the door to get a bus on the morning of Sept. 12. She mentioned that my sister left a message on the answering machine saying Timmy had been found strangled.

The news literally knocked me to my knees. I rocked back and forth on the floor, rolled up in a little ball, "no" ricocheting in my head while "I'm sorry" repeated in whispers.

My reaction stunned Madge. She hadn't expected me to take it so hard. I hadn't even seen Timmy for five years. She knew he and I had been engaged 17 years ago, that he was the man I went to jail with. She knew that I loved him, but it seemed like a lifetime ago. Until I heard of his death. Every ounce of love returned the second I realized I'd never see him again.

I'd started writing to him again this summer. I received a letter from him the week before asking me if I'd seen any good concerts or had any “good & wild sex,” asking me to send him pictures, telling me that I was always the crazy one...

I jumped up to call the prison. After getting a busy signal for 10 minutes, a spokesman at SCI-Pittsburgh confirmed the story and had nothing else to say.

Timmy was dead. It was the loneliest feeling, thinking no one cared about someone who had meant so much to me. Both his parents and one brother were dead. One brother's in federal prison. The other, he had no contact with. And he never had many friends. He'd been in trouble since he was 12 and spent most of his life in prison.

Besides, people who were friends with him for long ended up strung-out and in jail, too. Timmy had the addict's touch. It wasn't always golden, but it didn't always bruise.

Long drug's journey

In 1898, Friedrich Bayer and Co. introduced Heroin commercially. The pioneer pharmacologist Heinrich Dreser named it after the German word for "heroic." It had great potential for treating coughs and chest pains during a time when pneumonia and tuberculosis were two leading causes of death.

Narcotics were also prescribed to treat acute discomfort and stress. By 1900, there were an estimated 300,000 opiate-dependent persons in the United States. Older white women from the middle and upper classes constituted about two-thirds of them. Disabled Civil War veterans comprised most of the remaining one-third.

Both groups were treated with tolerance and kindness. Neither presented major social problems. Addiction was regarded as merely unfortunate. Doctors supplied drugs to these groups, and sanatoria were established for experimenting with questionable "cures."

However, the chronic nature of addiction was evident. Playwright Eugene O'Neill's mother, Mary Tyrone, depicted in the autobiographical drama, Long Day's Journey Into Night, was an addict. O'Neill's father understood addiction, the high relapse rate, which contributed to his refusal to send her to a sanitarium.

Doctors started using caution when writing prescriptions for narcotics. Incidence of addiction in both groups disappeared when they aged and died.

Drugstarved cowboys

It was a week night in July, 1979. I was routinely drinking down at Bob's Billboard Bar in Overbrook. I hadn't bothered putting make-up on.

I saw a group of strangers in the back room. I noticed Timmy, whose long, feathered hair was just like my therapist's. My friend Mike knew him ’cause his brother (dead, too) used to shoot dope with him. He introduced us, noting that Timmy had just gotten out of prison after two years, elbowing me in the side, saying he hadn't had a woman yet.

I looked over at Timmy, sitting back so relaxed and confident, smiling right through me like he knew I was going to change all that. I couldn't resist. We spent every night together after that. For as long as we could anyway.

Our third night together, he brought over some Percodan and a syringe. He put the yellow tablets in a shot glass and squirted warm water on them. Drew the liquid up through a tiny piece of cotton.

Even as I write this, I can feel that sickening warmth, the tight tingles. He stuck the needle in the skin on the back of my hand. I was finally a real drug addict.

Soon my nose itched incessantly. Soon my stomach ached, my skin paled and sweat until I finally gave in and vomited. I didn't really like it, but I loved Timmy. And he loved opiates.

Soon, we were traveling around the country, passing prescriptions for Dilaudid (a synthetic morphine) Timmy wrote on “scripts” he smuggled out of prison in a psychology book.

Soon I had to shoot dope so I wouldn't start going through withdrawal and throw up. Soon I was shooting dope in the middle of the night so I could go back sleep.

Soon, I was one jail cell away from Timmy with over 180 years worth of drug-related charges pressing against me. More than Manuel Noriega.

The wrong arm of the law

By the 1980s, there were an estimated 500,000 narcotics users in this country. While this estimate represents a 66-percent increase over the number of addicts in the late 19th century, the per capita rate was much higher then because the population has more than doubled.

And while addiction never changed, when the composition of the addicted population changed to poverty-stricken, largely nonwhite people, it became a social issue instead of a medical one.

In the Feb. 12 issue of The National Review, William. F. Buckley Jr. writes, "We are speaking of a plague that consumes an estimated $75 billion per year of public money, exacts an estimated $70 billion a year from consumers, is responsible for nearly 50 percent of the million Americans who are today in jail, occupies an estimated 50 percent of the trial time of our judiciary, and takes the time of 400,000 policemen — yet a plague for which no cure is at hand, nor in prospect."

U.S. correctional populations grew more than 2-1/2 times from 1980 to 1993. In 1993 about 2.6 percent of the U.S. population — 4.9 million adults — were on parole, on probation, or in jails or prisons, an increase of 3 million since 1980. State and local police made an estimated 1.1 million arrests for drug law violations in 1993.

The Federal drug control budget increased from $1.5 billion in fiscal 1981 to $13.2 billion in fiscal 1995. And yet, according to data from the 1993 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, 77 million Americans age 12 or older (37 percent of the population) admitted using an illicit drug at least once.

Drug legislation was never concerned with the addict. Beginning with the passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914, passed to fulfill U.S. obligations to uphold the international agreement of the 1912 Hague Convention designed to curtail the opium trade, increased legal pressure on addicts only increases the devastation of addiction.

The people who are really in denial about addiction are those in the recovery industry, concurrently damning addicts as being spiritually diseased while claiming to know how to save them. When addicts can't stay clean, we say they relapsed. In no other area of medical science do they place the failure of treatment on the patient with such zeal.

Cocaine addicts in Mexico participate in a treatment program where they have frontal lobotomies to have the pleasure center of their brains removed, as an experimental cure for their addiction.

They continued to relapse.

Higher love

The people who ran the Kansas jail I was in knew I wasn't a hardened criminal and were really nice. On Christmas day, church people brought gifts of citrus fruit and stacks of Readers Digest. The sheriff even ordered pizza for us.

Even doing such soft time, it was hard for me to keep it together. It's impossible to describe how it feels to be caged, to be arrested, strip searched, finger printed, photographed. It's the final stage of the complete depersonalization of an addict. I thought about suicide constantly.

The jailers decided to let Timmy ask me to marry him. On Valentine's day, 1980, I had to go to a psychiatric evaluation and would be in the county where Timmy was jailed. We got arrested with $400 so they let a jeweler visit him.

I hadn't seen him in months. Just wrote 10-page letters every day. Really bad poetry on pictures I would draw with colored pencils my mom sent. And not having seen him in so long, I was shaking. He had me sit on his lap and slipped the engagement ring on my finger without even asking.

I was released to a rehab. Lived with nuns in a halfway house for a month. I came back to Pittsburgh, was brutally attacked by a man who paid me to drop charges. I took it and bought a plane ticket back to Kansas to visit Timmy in the state prison he'd been moved to.

Just being caught in the state would be a violation of my probation, landing be back in jail for a 1-5 year sentence. But when he asked me to smuggle him in some Percs, I didn't object. I just wanted to make it easier on him.

By some strange fate, Timmy's lawyer had gotten him released, even despite his parole violations, to go to a rehab in St. Louis when I was there. We made love on the Greyhound bus. Couldn't stop kissing. We were together. I thought all our problems were over.

When we got to St. Louis, Timmy asked me to pass a script for some Percs. Up until then, I didn't understand addiction. I thought I was all he needed. The last time I ever kissed him was when I was boarding a bus back to Pittsburgh. He was back in jail within a month for passing bad scripts.

Ever since Timmy was killed, I keep wondering how I escaped his world. Mainly, I thought opiates and the people who did them were a drag. Junkies nodded off with books in their hands and called it reading. I shot dope and went to the mall. It was boring.

I never was dependent on the sub-culture for friends like Timmy. I was in and out in five months. I got out of jail and went back to my friends at the Billboard who liked to drink and listen to southern rock. Have fun. Smoke dope. Our drugs were acceptable.

I was also very lucky that most of my family were addicts (who are now in recovery) so they didn't shut me out.

But when I went to community college, I had my first dose of social acceptability. I was told I was bright and had a way with words. I found something to be good at and people to help me believe in my own abilities. Timmy just happened to be very good at doing drugs. But not getting them.

His final crime was robbing the Equibank in Brentwood, but did he deserve to die for it? Do we really live in a country that nods its tacit head in approval when a convict is murdered? Is a prison sentence supposed to be a death sentence?

I was so casual about when I'd go visit Timmy, when I’d finally see him after so many years. He wasn't due to get out of jail until 2012. Now I'll never see him again. A man everyone thought ruined my life. But no matter what, I knew he loved me. He never asked me to do anything he wasn't doing.

He was the first person who made me feel beautiful. To want to show me everything. And even in one of his final letters, he said he still felt the bond we had even after all these years. At least he knew I was still thinking about him.

On the day I heard of his death, it turned suddenly cold and rainy, but I kept finding myself at the kitchen door, looking up into the sky. Sometimes I felt like he was in every drop of rain landing so soft and cool on my face.

I saw a beautiful, bright orange butterfly. It was having a hard time flying in the rain but wouldn't go rest in the tree. I kept thinking, "Hey you stupid butterfly, go rest on a branch, the leaves will keep you dry," but it seemed to have some destination I couldn't see or understand.

Each drop of rain was so heavy on such delicate wings. I went back inside.

Timothy Boris was pronounced dead on Tuesday, Sept. 9 at 4:02 a.m. According to an SCI-Pittsburgh official, the Allegheny County Coroner ruled the cause of death was strangulation. Boris' brother, Dale, saw pictures of the body and said half his head and faced were caved in and that the cause of death appeared to be blunt trauma to the head. Timothy Boris' memorial service was held on Sept. 21, his birthday. He would have been 41.

The Killing Bus

After making my way through a crowded bus I step down into the stairwell of the center doors and see an alarming yellow and black sign that says, "To avoid physical injury, don't stand in step well. Doors may open unexpectedly." The industrial-disaster look of the sign makes me back up, but as I move towards the aisle packed with the unforgiving faces of those who don't want to make room for anyone, I figure I'll take my chances with the doors.

The bus picks up speed and wobbles through a bend. I grab the cold stainless steel railing and feel this strange clink under my hand. Oh yeah. I'm wearing the engagement ring Timmy gave me.

It's been weeks since he was murdered in Western Penitentiary. It's weird, but I can only wear the ring now that he's really gone. He just couldn't stay out of trouble. I never dared remembering how in love we'd been when he was still alive. It's all I think about lately. It seems so strange that the ring still fits, but I'll never take it off again.

Every time the bus hits a bump, I feel the same clinking traveling through me in tiny chills. I thought I already said good-bye to Timmy so many times, but that's when he was still alive, when there was still hope for ... well, I don't even know anymore. And part of me is so mad at him for providing me with yet another adventure in pain.

Oh man. He was beaten to death. My pain? Oh Timmy, I'm so sorry.

Shit. I said that out loud. No outbursts on a crowded bus. No room for sympathy. But it's just that I never got a chance to see him after we started writing again this summer. I just.

I just didn't want to visit him in prison again. I remember watching him be humiliated by guards who act like they think the "animals" do, but since they're being paid to do it, it's okay.

Then the visit would be over. I'd have to leave but Timmy couldn't. Outside again, I'd spend an hour staring at the prison, knowing he was just inside the walls, knowing there was nothing in the world I could do to free him. It was excruciating.

People yammer on with simpleminded shit about how you shouldn't do the crime if you can't do the time, but let's call a spade a spade, we're all guilty of something whether it's fudging numbers on an insurance claim or tax form, or drinking and driving (even on St. Patrick's day), or taking your wife's pain medicine or buying a little oral sex. I'd bet a million dollars that every American has committed a crime or is related to, has had sex with, has been arrested by or voted for someone who has.

Wait. Betting? I just proposed a crime. Gambling's illegal. Well unless it's run by a church or the state. Tricky business ... but vengeance is mine, saith the law. So I keep thinking I'm supposed to demand to know who murdered Timmy and have him subjected to the full weight of the law: death. But seeing someone else killed — I don't understand how that could bring anyone peace. And not because I don't want justice.

I just feel like so many people killed him. Before he was a habitual criminal, he was a little kid in school with his desk pulled away from the others and stuck in a corner. He was treated like I was. Like my son was. Like my friend who ended up a crack whore was. We all had what medical science is calling AD/HD. Hyperactive disorder. And we all ended up in jail after continually being isolated by inept authority figures who didn't even have the ethical presence to admit they didn't know how to deal with us. I'm assuming that they cared. Maybe I'm assuming too much.

But, as always, those with the power to change or evade the law have a very privileged perspective from which they decide who deserves to rot or die in prison. They're oh-so civilized when discussing terminating people they've never known or loved or kissed, never heard crying in the middle or night begging for help.

Nothing will bring Timmy back. Or Robert Brown, a 37 year-old inmate who died in Western Penn only a week after Timmy. Prison officials said Brown hit his head playing basketball. Must've been some game.

Suing the prison might prevent future deaths, for which the warden is ultimately responsible. Discipline-addicted, capital-punishment proponents are fond of saying "an eye for an eye" and believe that punishing by killing them deters future killings. I know it's ludicrous to suggest electrocuting the warden, even though, if such a law were in effect, by their own logic, Timmy and Brown would still be alive ....

I see a little black bug on the bus window and smash it without even thinking. Gee. I must be learning.


Holy Shit

A man's bright blue eyes are suddenly inches from mine at the bus stop. I mean right in my face, he asks, "Have you been saved by the love of Jesus?"

At the bus stop? Is this a trick question?

I open my mouth to talk but nothing comes. To explain would take hours. The answer is yes, but not in a way he'd think was right. This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately. But he seems like a nice enough man so I just smile, raise my eyebrows in some kind of apology, pat him on the shoulder and tell him there's no hope for me, that he's wasting his time.

He immediately believes me, which is kinda insulting but still a relief, and starts to move on. Then I hear a voice snarling in a tone tensing every muscle in my neck, "Get. Your. Hands. Off. My husband."

A woman's irate blue eyes are suddenly blaring within inches of mine. I guess witnessing for the Lord hardened her, but she picked the wrong day to start shit with this sinner. I stare right back. How dare she talk to me like I'm some whore just 'cause I don't want to hear their shit?

I answer her ugly accusation, "Oh, you got the love of Jesus in your heart, don't you? I mean you wouldn't hate me just because I don't believe in God the same way, right? Oh yeah, I can see the love of the Lord in you, sister."

She gives the classic holier-than-thou return, "I don't hate you, I feel sorry for you."

My voice tightens, "Because I'm not like you? Because the thought of billions of non-believers burning in hell doesn't bring me peace?"

The husband comes back, flapping his sacred prop at me like he wants to hit me with it, "The Bible is truth!"

I ain't afraid of no book. I get in his puckered and pulsing face: "Well if it's the truth, why are there so many versions of it? I mean are you really ignorant enough to believe that after 2,000 years, after being in the hands of so many political bodies, that it hasn't been changed?"

He answers, puttering: "It's been changed, oh it's changed but the truth doesn't. You need Jesus, lady."

My voice is trembling, louder, out of my blues I say, "A friend of mine was recently killed in prison, where was your Jesus for him?"

Quiet swallows every sound. The holy hasslers drop their heads and move along like they didn't even hear me.

When the going gets tough, they get going all right. No answers for why Timmy couldn't even die a free man, why so many lives amount to nothing because of assholes why think they have a right to tell others how to live. Who think they have the ultimate authority to decide who is valuable according to their tiny truths riddled with convenient contradictions, enough to justify unlimited amounts of brutality, even murder. And then they treat me like I'm decrepit because I won't go for it?

No, they're not getting away that easy. I feel like I've been waiting for this moment my whole life. Time to commit the ultimate sin. I look over at them and say, louder than I expected: "So just fuck you. Oops! I said "fuck you" to Christians. I'll burn for sure now."

A teen-aged girl sitting on top of the trash can says "I heard that."

Shit. That's all teen-agers ever hear.

My turn to drop my head. Arguing with Fundamentalists at the bus stop, Kathy Jo? That's a bad sign. And I still can't stop trembling. A bad sign. Even if I did amuse the hell out of a bunch of teen-agers. A bad sign.

But I don't know how to act. This whole thing with Timmy. I don't know. Where's the bus? I just want a bus.

I bury my chin in my chest, grateful that I can hide inside my long red hair. One thought repeats itself in my head: I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. The words are a mantra. Like if I say it enough, I'll be forgiven. And I'm sorry for so many things, I'm not even sure what I'm apologizing for anymore.

I spent the week in the excruciating process of trying to write an informative cover story about a tragedy I just can't understand. Can't even believe happened. I mean what I'm feeling isn't shit compared to what Timmy went through.

America, right now I hate you. I'm sorry. Oh, so here's a packed Carrick bus. Whatever. I'll just get on like the most spent bitch alive. Even the teen-agers seem scared of me. Good.

As I nudge by people to get to the back, I'm sure to mumble "excuse me." The cubby hole near the center doors is vacant. I step down in there, put my headphones on, look out the window and disappear into Timmy's favorite song, Gregg Allman's "Queen of Hearts."

I finally stop shaking even though I have a feeling it's going to be a long ride home.

Ashes to Ashes, Bus to Bus

I feel like I've been standing on the same bus for weeks. Like I'm never going to get home. Like I've been on the bus for years. Like I won't even recognize my house. Like my skin has grown a filmy new layer made from the sweat and breath of everyone on the bus — fragments of cigarettes, spearmint chewing gum, Arby's Horsy sauce cling to my face. Accumulating. I can't breathe. Overheated. Bones grinding against each other, kneecaps threatening to pop as I shift my weight. And yet, the closer I get to my stop, the heavier, not lighter I become.

If I looked like I felt, there'd be broken springs hanging from me, limbs dangling cracked. Fingers missing. Lay me down, my eyes clink shut. Pick me up, they open, stare straight ahead. Pick me up and shake me, hear the sound of brokenness. Drop me again. It's just that the rattling is so startling. And each time, it gets louder. But each time, the floor's the same.

Except I'm too smart and strong to suffer. And now that I've been off welfare for almost two years, now that I'm such a success well, survivors don't whine, right? It's just so fucked. The whole time I was on welfare, I thought if I could just get off it, that everything would change. Well, it did. I've never been so alone in my life.

Oh what is it about the bus that makes everything so dramatic? Well I guess it's just that other people can see me. So while I feel like my legs are going to give way, I have to stand here as if I got my shit together so severely I don't even have to hold on to a rail to keep my balance. I love myself for being able to pull it off. I hate the world for making me have to. For making me feel like I'm not entitled to my weaknesses. Like I'm a loser or liar for being so spent. Like I'm asking them for something.

I can't wait to get home where no one can see me. But I'm going to what is my very own apartment for the first time in my whole life. I've always dreamed of having my own place, but I thought it would happen after my son was in college, not after he was in jail and went to live with his father. And I never dreamed my wish would come true right after a man I had loved was murdered. Killed. Died. In prison. Timmy was always gone but I mean he's never coming back this time.

Gosh... and just three days after that, it was time for my roommate Madge to move on up to New York City. I have to keep telling myself that she didn't die because it's just so weird that she's suddenly gone. She was my bestest friend. I'd never have gotten through losing my son without her. But now she's gone. I did have Leo this summer, even went to get papers to keep him but sent him back out to the country again. And Timmy, I'd just found out where he was. All gone. Every night I sleep in the bed that was ours, thinking how enormous it is. How small I'm getting.

The bus continues up the hill, stopping often to let people off but it never seems to be any less crowded. I look out the window and get a serious case of car envy. I can't go through the drills that people in cars do. I see them screaming at no one, or losing their minds and beating on steering wheels, safely locked inside steel and glass. I wonder how many times a day they're tempted to drive off cliffs or head-on into other cars.

If I had a car tonight, well. I'd probably still be heading home to have a few cocktails. Even though they say if you drink alone, that you're an alcoholic. But what if you only drink when you're alone? And I can't believe I'm thinking this, but what does it matter anyway?

I feel so differently about dying. Like if Timmy can survive being beat to death and strangled in prison, well I mean he didn't survive but he was able to die. Just like Jack Nicholson said in that Ironweed movie, you die when you can. And now I feel like he died just so I would know it wasn't so bad, that I could do it.

Timmy hurt me so much and I don't hate him so how dare people that never knew him react with satisfaction to his killing? I don't hate criminals and I've been raped, robbed — man, twice in this past year, people that I've known have stolen money off me after I let them stay at my house. I just don't take it personally anymore.

The bus picks up speed, the aisles are clearing, I could even sit down. But even if I would have gotten a seat tonight, it wouldn't help the tiny aches keeping me awake. Besides, in my entire life on the bus, never once has it failed to not take me to my stop. And that thought restores my knees. Loosens my lungs. Yes... a breeze sneaks in under the center doors. My face cools and shrinks.

I'm all alone but almost home... ashes to ashes, bus to bus.