Killing Time

The two condemned men raise questions about their guilt

The heavy metal door swings open, and Philip Ray Workman steps out of the shadows into the glare of the fluorescent lights in the visiting room on death row. Muscular like many convicts, he looks fit and wears wire-rim spectacles and a neatly trimmed goatee. In another context, he could pass for a health spa masseuse. He smiles as he shakes my hand, and appropriately enough for someone who may have only a few more months to live, he goes straight to the point. “I really appreciate your coming,” he says. “I need all the help I can get, Lord knows.”

Workman, a born-again Christian who claims he’s an innocent man, could become the first person executed in Tennessee since 1960—that is, unless luck runs out faster for Robert Glen Coe, another convicted killer who says he didn’t do it.

After nearly four decades without an execution in this state, there now are two condemned men down to their final legal appeals, and three more nearing the last of theirs. It seems likely that soon, possibly by year’s end in the cases of Workman and Coe, Tennessee finally will begin satisfying the overwhelming public clamor for the deaths of murderers.

Death-penalty proponents contend executions will mete out justice and retribution, even if they don’t make Tennessee a safer place. Opponents argue capital punishment will cheapen everyone’s life and descend the state into a kind of barbarism in which some people die because they had bad lawyers.

The final appeals of Workman and Coe contain all the makings of a John Grisham bestseller: There are shadowy characters, official cover-ups, perjury, drugs, insanity, mysteriously disappearing police files, two wrongly accused men, of course, and loads of corrupt cops, bumbling defense attorneys, and arrogant, God-fearing prosecutors.

It’s easy to dismiss it all as the desperate, 11th-hour pleading of condemned men, which is exactly what it is, certainly. The problem is, what if it’s true? Should we be so confident in sending these men to their deaths? These questions aren’t so easily answered.

That the state might execute an innocent man isn’t as preposterous as it seems. Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 566 people have been executed. But 82 inmates awaiting executions have been exonerated—six this year. That’s an alarming ratio of one inmate freed for every seven put to death.

Regardless of Workman’s or Coe’s guilt or innocence, it’s hard to argue with either man’s contention that he wouldn’t be waiting to die if his first lawyer had mounted the vigorous defense now pressed in his appeal.

Workman and Coe are typical of convicted killers sentenced to die in this country. They are poor, and their victims were white. Workman, 46, was convicted of killing a policeman while robbing a Wendy’s restaurant in 1981 in Memphis. A junkie, he held up the Wendy’s for drug money. Unbeknownst to him, one of the fast-food workers pushed a silent alarm, and when Workman tried to get away, the police were waiting. Gunfire blazed, and police Lt. Ronald Oliver died of a single bullet wound to the chest—of this much, we can be certain, but not a lot else.

Workman at first agreed with prosecutors that he must have fired the bullet that killed Oliver. He now contends another policeman did it by mistake in the confusion at closing time in the restaurant’s dark parking lot.

Coe, 43, was found guilty of abducting and murdering 8-year-old Cary Ann Medlin in 1979 in the West Tennessee town of Greenfield. It’s one of the most notorious cases in the annals of Tennessee crime. Coe confessed, saying he decided to kill the girl because, after he raped and sodomized her, she told him, “Jesus loves you.” He said that infuriated him, so he strangled Cary Ann and then, when she wouldn’t die, he stabbed her in the neck with his pocketknife and watched her bleed to death.

A diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, Coe now claims he was duped into confessing. He blames another man, who was under police suspicion at one time, for the murder.

Cary Ann’s mother, Charlotte Medlin Stout—who has waited 20 years for her daughter’s killer to receive his sentence—already has notified prison officials that she wishes to witness Coe’s execution. “It’s going to be such a great relief that I can’t express it in words,” she told me. “I will be thankful to God in heaven when this is over. Coe has never expressed remorse to me. He has never indicated in any way that he is sorry. So if in those last few moments of his life, he wants to look at me and say he’s sorry, I’m going to be there.