 "Photo: Joey Castillo")
Most people in Fredericksburg remember Scott Panetti as he walked around town in rawhide boots or moccasins he'd made himself, dressed in buckskin clothes with knives strapped around his waist, or else dressed up in camouflage. He said he'd been a U.S. Navy SEAL, and he talked about fighting in Vietnam, though he was only 14 years old when the conflict ended. He drove around the town, 74 miles north of Austin, in his Jeep with tools for horseshoing strapped on the back. On a good day he was friendly and enthusiastic.
But people in town also know about how he beat and threatened his first wife. Court documents state that Scott nailed the curtains shut and drove knives into the ground to exorcise the devil.
Most people remember the fights he had with his second wife, Sonja Alvarado. Meridel Solbrig, Scott's lawyer since the first divorce, said she remembers being called by the sheriff's deputies when she was in New Braunfels with her parents. They wanted her to talk to Scott, to see if she could calm him down.
"It was probably just inevitable with Scott," said Milton Jung, sitting in his office on U.S. Highway 290. Jung has been sheriff of Gillespie County since 1986. "You're never sure whether it's gonna happen or not."
In the fall of 1992, it happened. Sonja had left him in July and taken their 3-year-old daughter with her to stay at her parents' house. Scott stalked them, he looked in their windows at night, and when her mother complained to the sheriff, they said there was nothing they could do. He hadn't hurt anyone yet.
On Sept. 8, he broke into the Alvarados' house, shot Sonja's father and then her mother, and grabbed her and her daughter, driving them to a friend's house on a twisting road west of town, where he held them hostage.
It's been almost 15 years since the murders, but Sonja and her relatives are still waiting. Scott's family is waiting, and so are all the lawyers and psychiatrists he's seen over the years. Since he was sentenced to death in 1995, lawyers have been appealing his case. They claim he didn't get due process of the law in the trial, during which he defended himself by rambling and strutting in cowboy clothes. They say he is too delusional to be executed. Thirty hours before he was to be executed in 2004, a federal court granted his appeal and reviewed the case of his competence to face execution.
Tomorrow the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case and have the final say on whether or not it is cruel and unusual punishment to execute Scott and others like him who are mentally competent in some ways, but delusional about the reasons for their execution. Scott Panetti now says he is persecuted for preaching the gospels of Jesus Christ. The case may change competency standards for executing the mentally ill.
"He's deteriorated; he looks like a sick person," Sonja said.
She's seen pictures of her former husband with his beard grown out, rambling on the news.
"Before, I thought about wanting to see him to ask why he did it, but I don't even want to ask that," she said. "I just want justice for my parents. I'm tired of everything being up in air."
SUBHEAD: Sarge Go Boom Boom
For Rowena Becker, Sonja's younger sister, Scott was the big brother she never had. He babysat her children and gave her recipes for cooking deer meat. She and Sonja were so close that Sonja and Scott got married on her wedding anniversary. After Sonja gave birth to their baby Amanda, named after her mother, Scott would bring her to sit at the counter of the diner where Sonja worked.
Sonja said the first time she started to wonder if something was wrong with Scott was when she found pill bottles in the refrigerator from Kerrville State Hospital, a facility for the mentally ill and substance-abusers. Other family members remember other warning signs. Becker remembers that Scott stopped coming around, because he was out drinking with new friends. He pulled a knife on Pete Carrion, Sonja's uncle, but backed down when Carrion pulled his. Sonja says he threatened her. One night he chased her and their daughter around the house with a rifle until he passed out drunk. After that Sonja left him, went to stay with her parents and got a protective order. Scott ignored it. He drove by the house, threatened her parents and looked in the windows at night.
Carrion said that Sonja's mom came over and said she was worried for her daughter, because Scott had come by and threatened them. It was the last time he saw her alive.
A week later, Sonja was the guest bedroom of her parents' house. She woke to the sound of breaking glass and saw Scott, wearing camouflage clothes, coming in through the sliding door over the broken glass. She ran, and he chased her outside and hit her with the butt of his rifle. When she got up, she didn't see Scott, but her mother yelled for her to come inside, and she crawled towards the door. Just after her mother slammed the door behind her, they heard footsteps and then a shot. The knob flew off, and Scott burst in. Her father tried to keep Scott at bay with a kitchen knife. He had gotten rid of his guns five years before when he became a serious Christian.
Scott took the knife, backed them into the hall and shot Joe Alvarado. When Sonja's mother tried to go toward him, he pushed her back with his gun and shot while it was still touching her. Blood sprayed out: Amanda Alvarado's heart had exploded, according to the coroner.
When Sonja recalls that morning, she said she can still feel the heat of the blood that covered her and her 3-year-old daughter, who had come out of hiding. Scott told her she had betrayed him and pointed the gun at her, but it jammed. Before he led her and her daughter out, she looked at her parents and saw her father, still alive, looking at her mother before his eyes closed. Scott pulled her, and she slipped on the blood and glass that covered the floor.
He drove them out to a friend's house out of town and had them change from their blood-soaked clothes into some of his. She said that he had shaved his head, and his hair was on the floor. She saw a machete sticking out of a wood block.
"I was crying the whole time," Sonja said. "He told me he'd heard voices, that he didn't know if he was going to kill us or let us go."
Sonja said that at some point he looked at her and starting crying saying, "Look at your face, look at what I've done to you. ... What are my parents going to think of me?"
After two or three hours he released them, and they slid down a hill to the cattle guard where policemen were waiting. Sonja said some members of the sheriff's office who'd been called to break up their fights looked away guiltily when they passed.
Back on West Austin Street, family who heard the news had driven to the Alvarados' house.
Rowena Becker and Lena Lozano, Amanda Alvarado's little sister, reached the house at different times and tried to get past the yellow tape. The last time Becker saw her mother, they had planned a family birthday party that was supposed to happen a few weeks later. The last time Lozano saw her sister, Amanda Alvarado showed her new clothes she'd bought to celebrate her weight loss.
"She didn't get to wear those brand-new clothes," said Lozano, sitting in her house just out of town surrounded by grandchildren. "To this day, it still hurts."
SUBHEAD: The Far Side of Pathetic
One of the reasons some are still unsatisfied with the case is that few got to have their say during the trial. Scott was ruled as competent to stand trial. He stopped taking his medication on April Fool's Day after he claimed he had a revelation from God and decided that the courts were in a conspiracy against him. He fired his lawyers, electing to defend himself, because he thought it was the only way to give credibility to his story. Before the trial, he mailed off all his court documents to family members in elaborately decorated envelopes so prison personnel wouldn't read them. Scott Monroe was appointed as Panetti's stand-by consul, to advise him, but Panetti ignored his advice, instead working on an elaborate book of cowboy poems and passing Monroe slips of paper covered in writing. One, torn off of a church program, reads, "TAME A BRONC With YouR TONGUE, TAME THE BRONC your tongue," and quotes Luke in the Bible, "But there shall not an hair of your head perish, in your patience possess ye your souls."
"His trial was on the far side of pathetic," said Richard Coons, a psychiatrist who examined Scott before the trial. In court, Scott dressed like a cowboy and issued a rambling opening statement in which he showed the court his tattoo, talked about his high school sweetheart, bull riding and his father's resemblance to Colonel Sanders.
Monroe watched aghast.
"That's when it kind of dawned on me that Scott wasn't going to focus on the issue at hand," said Monroe, sitting in his wood-paneled Kerrville office. "He wasn't going to prove mental illness except by his behavior."
The affidavits of the witnesses he called radiate frustration and disappointment. One psychiatrist was asked to appear but didn't know which records to find. When he cross-examined his former lawyer Meridel Solbrig, he asked if they had ever had a sexual relationship. He subpoenaed John F. Kennedy for his character, other inmates, Anne Bancroft and the editor of the newspaper in Fredericksburg, asking him to bring in every article about his case.
"It was like a big joke, and the joke was on me," said Sonja Alvarado. Scott cross-examined her for four hours, asking irrelevant questions about their marriage.
Monroe remember Scott incessantly asked why he couldn't see his daughter and burst out at Sonja, "Why are you being so mean to me?" She replied, "Scott, you killed my parents."
"It was like he was clueless," Monroe said. "That never should have been allowed to happen."
Monroe said Scott should not have been ruled competent to stand trial but that juries are reluctant to find people incompetent, because they're afraid it will set them free.
Monroe said the moment that he thinks got Scott the death penalty was when he let himself be inhabited by the personality he said did the murders, Sarge, leaning forward, speaking in a low voice and then holding out his arm and yelling "SARGE GO BOOM BOOM."
Members of the jury moved back.
After his death sentence came in, Scott called one more "pow-wow" with Monroe, his name for the cigar breaks he had taken.
"I said 'Scott, I'm so sorry,' and he looked at me and said, 'Why, because I'm gonna get to heaven before you?'" Monroe recalled.
SUBHEAD: Life or Death
Scott listed his parents, brother, lawyer and Karin Eberhart as his contacts on his execution form. Eberhart, who lives in Switzerland, has been Scott's pen pal since 1997.
"Scott's belief in God got stronger over the years of imprisonment on death row. He is getting no medication there," wrote Eberhart in an e-mail from Zurich. Scott writes her twice a week, and she visits him a few times year.
Shortly before his execution date, Scott spent a long time talking to the warden, asking for cowboy boots and a wedding ring to have a fake marriage with her.
During that time, his lawyers submitted constant appeals to the judges regarding his competency. His parents were living in a trailer near death row to be there for his execution. The day before he was set to die, a federal judge granted his appeal and required that his competency to be executed be reviewed.
"When I heard a schizophrenic person had represented himself, I could not believe it," said Keith Hampton in his office on Nueces Street. Hampton came onto the case after Panetti's execution was postponed in 2004. He will argue his case in Washington, D.C., before the Supreme Court Wednesday. "The real cause of it all is a bureaucratic mind-set judges fall into - he is clearly insane."
The Supreme Court turns on interpretation of the 1986 case Ford v. Wainwright, in which it was ruled cruel and unusual to execute Alvin Ford, who didn't understand he was on death row.
To standard to determine competency to be executed set in the Ford case is that a person must be aware they are going to executed and why so that they can prepare themselves. In interviews with a psychologist, Scott said he understands his fate but thinks the state is in a conspiracy to prevent him from going back to Wisconsin, where his parents live, and preaching the gospel. The legal questions of the case turn on whether or not it is cruel and unusual to execute someone who is aware of the their execution but does not factually understand it.
But the Ford standard was part of a concurring opinion, not the majority one, so it currently stands as more of a recommendation than anything else. Often people ruled incompetent are not treated, to keep them from being executed.
Wednesday's case, once decided, may change that by clarifying the standards for executing mentally ill people.
For Sonja Alvarado and her family, none of it matters. Rowena Becker, who left Fredericksburg after her best friend died, has nightmares that she is trying to board up her house to keep Scott out. Lena Lozano still remembers going to the funeral and seeing her sister and brother-in-law's caskets lined up next to each other, especially on Easter, the day of the year Amanda Alvarado cooked the biggest family meals. Everyone in the family agrees that since the murders, it hasn't been the same; they haven't gotten together as much and many have left Fredericksburg. "She kept the family together," Becker said of her mother. "I forgive Scott. I don't hate him anymore, but I won't feel safe until he isn't breathing."
Sonja still struggles with the memories. She has flashbacks of the blood and of seeing her father look at her mother before he died. She still does her laundry and her shopping in Kerrville, half an hour away, so that people won't stare at her. Occasionally people come in to her new job at a beauty parlor and ask if Scott is dead yet.
Sonja said for a long time after the murders she felt like she was in a shell, like everyone blamed her for her parents' death. But she's coming out of her shell now. She doesn't care if Scott lives or dies, she just wants to know which it will be. She only finds out about developments in his case when reporters start leaving messages on her voicemail again.
"It angers me whenever I think about it, whenever I think about how he changed my life and everybody else's," she said, sitting in an armchair in her apartment looking ahead. Next to her on a small table, her parents smile from a large photograph, looking outward. Next to it, there is picture of her daughter, who is looking for a job now and spends most of her time at home with her mother or writing in her journal.
"Life or death. Make up your minds," she says. "I just want it to be over with."
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